Choices
by Jurious
Summary: Hope is a special little girl, but no one knows it. Not even her. An altraverse tale which depicts the knock on effects of one of the most difficult choices the Ninth Doctor ever has to make, after he fails to rescue Rose from the Dalek fleet...
1. Hope

**Title: **Choices  
**Status: **WIP  
**Rating: **12 (for infrequent language and sexual intimations. This part is a U, though.)  
**Pairing: **Nine/Rose  
**Notes:**This is'altraverse' tale which depicts the knock-on effects of one of the most difficult choices the Ninth Doctor ever has to make, after he fails to rescue Rose from the Dalek fleet. This story will jump about the time-line and contain general spoilers for the series, though there are none in this chapter.  
**Credit to:** Helen (LJ name: **lovepollution**) for Hope's name. Because it _is_ perfect.

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Part 1 - Hope

Hope was a special girl. No one really noticed it because she didn't seem so different from any other toddler, and it was true to say that even _she_ didn't quite realise how unique she was, but the fact remained that she was special. She sometimes saw things that weren't there - or at least things that weren't there _yet,_ or which hadn't been there for a long time. She possessed what some might call a sixth sense; not that anyone knew about it, but her mother, at least, was certain she was special. All mother's think their children are special, of course, but Hope's mother knew her child was particularly special because she knew more about her daughter than anyone else.

It was one Tuesday morning that Hope's grandma decided to take her to the local park for a while. And so out came the pushchair and the child-harness (because one might be surprised at how quickly a toddler can scamper away) and off the two went, out the front door and down the stairwell of their block of flats, then along the paths that wound between the local high-rises, and on toward the park.

This Tuesday morning, it must be noted, wasn't particularly special in any way - it was, in truth, just like any other Tuesday - but it was to prove rather important to the young Hope for a reason only she would ever know.

Once they had reached the park, Hope's grandma bumped into a young lady called Colleen, a neighbour of theirs who lived on the ground floor of their block of flats, and who had happened to bring her own little girl, Rachel, to the park this morning. Never one to pass up a good gossip, Hope's grandma was soon nattering vigorously to Colleen, and it didn't take long for Hope, sat in her buggy, to get restless.

"Here goes little madam," Hope's grandma thus said with a sigh, as Colleen went on to talk about her Rachel's propensity for tantrums ('which she must have got from her father'), and Hope was soon fitted in her little harness and was free to then totter about nearby. Little Rachel, meanwhile, was forced to just sit in her pushchair and gawp on in envy.

It might be worthwhile to mention that Hope was almost two years old now, a few months younger than Rachel, and was a pretty girl with bright blue eyes and dark brown hair. There had been a lot of tension between her mother and her grandmother prior to her birth - not that she was to know about that - but once she had been born, all that had dissipated, and she was now the apple of their eyes; they couldn't imagine life without her.

And so Hope toddled around and watched her own feet patter about beneath her in amazement, until, all of a sudden, her entire body was overtaken by a cool, tingling sensation, and she, for some reason unknown to her, found her eyes drawn to the far side of the playground. And then she saw something, something that she knew wasn't really there (though, in some era of time and space, it would be). It was a large, metal robot with a rounded head and a bulky body. The head had a long stalk sticking out of it, and a pair of flashing lights mounted on top, whilst the body was embossed with many rounded spheres, and coated in a grubby, golden finish. It had two long, thin arms held out before it, from its midsection, and it glided along the ground as if on steady wheels, for it had no legs. Overall, it looked somewhat comical, and yet it was frightening, too; there was something about it which sent a terrible chill through Hope's tiny body, a chill which told her that this thing was a bringer of death and of worse. She thus pointed at the apparition with her chubby little hand and began to cry.

Her grandma instantly rushed over and took her up in her arms. "What's wrong, sweetheart?" she asked, her eyes following her granddaughter's pointed finger, but seeing nothing. "What's the matter? There's nothing there."

But Hope saw it, until the monster faded back into the mire of time from which it had arisen, a vision of a past or a future that Hope never wanted to be a part of.

She soon calmed down, as toddlers do, however, and was smiling and laughing again within the hour, beaming all the way back home where her mother and Uncle Jack were waiting to see her.

---

Hope was still special when she was five, but still no one knew it. Another unremarkable Tuesday came and, as fate would have it, she was again at the park, playing with Rachel from downstairs under Colleen and her grandma's supervision. She chased Rachel round the playground and up the climbing frame, and then they decided to play hide and seek. Rachel wanted to count first so off Hope went to seek a place to hide.

She soon came up with the perfect place - there was a small hovel right beneath the slide, a dark little den where the kids often played, and where she knew Rachel would never think of looking. So off Hope ran, sprinting toward the slide before she crouched into the hovel and began to sneak beneath it. It was as soon as she had gotten herself halfway into the hideaway that she stopped dead, for her body had filled with that cold tingling feeling again, the same as the one she'd felt when she was two, and which she had felt many a time since. She took a deep breath and braced herself for whatever horrors she might see this time, but, when she turned, she saw nothing; no metal robots, no raging fires, no screaming people, no death and destruction. Nothing. That was until a man came rushing her way, a tall dark stranger in a battered leather jacket who looked like the kind of man one should never cross.

Hope watched this man with interest from her place beneath the slide, for she just knew that there was something special about him.

The man continued to run full-pelt in her direction, his eyes fixed on a small, blinking device in his hand, which flashed blue every other second, and which he followed in whatever direction it by some means indicated to him. It wasn't long until he skidded to a halt right in front of Hope's slide and stood contemplating things for a while, his feet planted but centimetres from the entrance to the little den.

Hope gasped at this and pushed herself further backwards into the hidey-hole, for she was suddenly afraid of what was going on; if this man was the bringer of her cold sensations, then he surely couldn't be good news...

The stranger's boots remained in front of her hideaway for some time before he suddenly crouched down and continued to frown at his blinking blue device; he looked rather puzzled by its current behaviour, and, as it continued to make a rather insistent pulsing sound, he began to extend it further and further away from his body, trying to discover where on earth it was leading him. It seemed to be inclined toward Hope, because the closer it got to her, the more frenetic it became. Hope swallowed in fear as she realised where this was leading, though the stranger as yet had failed to even notice her because he was so transfixed on his noisy device; he only continued to extend it in her direction, causing her to crawl backwards in an effort to evade him. Hope soon found herself forced into a corner, though, and could then do nothing to prevent the man from manoeuvring his gadget lightly into her forehead. It thus went absolutely ballistic and the stranger finally looked up to see her sat there.

Hope's mind jolted like an electrical current as her eyes connected with the man's, and she froze up in terror as the cold sensation in her body intensified threefold.

It would be fair to say that the man was as perplexed and shocked as she was by this turn of events, however - this was the last thing he had been expecting to find - but he soon brought the tense moment to an end by breaking out into a wide grin and saying, "Hello."

Hope swallowed. "Hello…?" she stuttered in return, bringing her knees tightly up to her chest and curling into a ball.

"Yes, hello," the stranger said again, before he began to fiddle with his device, rapping it against the underside of the slide and making the metal resonate around them. "Hmm… must be having an off day," he muttered. "Well, we all do, don't we?"

Hope still only watched in bewilderment whilst her chest throbbed with heartbeats.

"It seems to think you're what I'm looking for," the man explained with a laugh, glancing at her again briefly, "but you're just a little girl, aren't you?"

"I think so," Hope whispered.

The man grinned again, a smile which was surprisingly comforting to her, and she consequently found herself trusting him without qualms. He then somehow added to this comforting aura by simply opting to sit down next to her, crossing his long legs on the ground, whilst he fiddled with his small, tubular gadget. "It must be a wrong signal…" he mused, "Perhaps something nearby is throwing it off. There aren't any Siamese twins in the neighbourhood, by chance?"

Hope blinked. "What?"

"Oh, never mind," he went on, pocketing the blinking device and giving her another smile. "Sorry to have disturbed you."

Hope swallowed again and looked the man up and down as he began to get to his feet. "Have you lost someone?" she asked.

His frivolous manner faded a little, and he seemed to lapse back into a world of his own. "Yes…" he replied, "and I'm going to find her again soon. But that's not what I'm looking for right now."

"What are you looking for?"

He rose two fingers in a kind of victory gesture; "Two hearts," he said.

Hope giggled. "Why?"

He gave her another gentle smile. "Because I need their help. I thought I was the last but… I'm not. And if I don't find them before they do, then…"

His voice trailed away, dry and jaded, and Hope cocked her head to the side as she tried to comprehend this peculiar and enigmatic man. "I hope you find them," she said.

He smiled kindly at her, heartened by her naïve empathy. "Me too," he chirped as he clambered fully out from beneath the slide and turned to go.

He walked a couple of paces before he then stopped dead in his tracks and turned back to look at Hope with a knitted brow. "Dangerous things are going to start happening, little girl," he said.

She watched him in silence.

"Do you believe me?"

She paused for a moment before she offered him another smile and nodded. "Yeah."

He gave her a quick smirk in return. "And will your mummy and daddy believe you if you tell them?"

Hope's face remained neutral. "I don't have a daddy," she said.

The man gave her a weak smile this time. "Some of us don't have anyone."

"But I'll tell mummy," Hope went on. "She'll believe me."

He nodded again. "Good girl." He then began to march off once more, but turned and regarded her for yet another time, whilst he continued to walk away backwards. "I'm the Doctor, by the way," he called. "What's your name?"

"Hope," she replied.

He gave her a little wave. "Nice to meet you, Hope. Now go home, and forget me."

Hope watched the man turn and then run, before he cleared a fence with an athletic leap and disappeared from view. She then just sat back and thought about him, refusing to move even when Rachel had managed to find her, until her grandma came to get her to take her home for her tea. She couldn't wait to tell her mummy all about it, though.

---

Hope and her gran said farewell to Rachel and Colleen at the bottom of the stairwell once they reached their block of flats, before they then made their way back up the flight of stairs. Hope ran on ahead, eager to tell her mother of the mysterious man she had met and of the danger that was apparently coming. Mum always believed her stories; she always believed everything she said about seeing metal monsters and destruction all around them. Hope didn't know why her mum believed her, but she was glad that she did, because no one else did... Well, Uncle Jack did, but that was all. Grandma thought she was 'telling tales', like most kids, whilst the teachers at school assumed she was just a very imaginative child, and the other children thought she simply made up super-cool stories for them to re-enact at play time; but the truth was these visions were _real_. She still didn't quite realise that other people didn't see things like she did, though.

As soon as Hope and her grandma reached their floor, Hope rushed out of the stairwell and to their front door, which, with a great pull on the handle, she managed to push open. "Mummy!" she called, running down the hall and into the lounge, "Mummy, guess what?"

She then shrieked as a great pair of arms grabbed her from behind and a man growled into her neck, "You're late for your dinner, so Uncle Jack's here to eat you!" He then lifted her up into the air and swung her round.

Hope laughed as she flew through the air and then threw her arms around the man's neck. "Uncle Jack!" she cried, as he sat her in his arms and looked at her with a grin.

"My, you're getting big, aren't you?" he said. "Did you have fun at the park?"

"I met someone!" she said. "A man."

Jack wasn't sure whether to be troubled or not upon hearing this. "A man, honey?"

"Yeah, he was funny. I have to tell mummy something."

Uncle Jack - who wasn't a blood uncle, but liked to think of himself as an uncle nevertheless - put Hope on the floor and watched her totter over to the armchair where her mother was sat.

"Hello, sweetheart," Hope's young mother said, giving her girl a big hug. "Did you have fun?"

"Yeah, loads of fun!"

Hope heaved herself into her mother's lap whilst Jack took a seat on the sofa and Hope's grandma sat next to him, shaking her head at what she took as Hope's hyperactivity.

"I met this man, mummy," Hope explained as she hugged her mother and rested her head against her chest, listening to her single heartbeat, "He said I should tell you danger's coming."

Hope's mother's hand - which had been stroking her daughter's hair - came to a sudden pause. "'Danger'?" she asked.

"Yeah. He told me that I should tell my mummy and daddy about it, but I said I didn't have a daddy, so I said I'd just tell you."

"Oh, honestly, Hope," her grandma sighed in exasperation, "there wasn't anyone there."

"But there was!" Hope insisted, "You didn't see 'im!" She looked back at her mother and stared into her large brown eyes. "He was lookin' for two hearts, and this thingy he had kept bleeping at me and he said it must be wrong because I'm just a little girl."

Jack exchanged a glance with Hope's mother, for they were both suddenly caught between the same feelings of unease and optimism.

"What did he look like, honey?" Jack asked.

Hope beamed. "Tall. He looked dang'rous at first, but he wasn't. He was funny."

"Did he tell you his name?" Jack continued.

"Yeah. Doctor," she said.

Jack looked at Rose, Hope's mother, and then to Jackie, Hope's grandmother, and quickly leapt to his feet and ran. There might still be hope…

TBC…


	2. Parting of the Ways

**Title: **Choices  
**Status: **WIP  
**Rating: **12  
**Pairing: **Nine/Rose  
**Notes:** General spoilers for the end of the episode 'Bad Wolf' and the start of 'Parting of the Ways' (I know I've paraphrased some of the dialogue from PotW - I was doing it from memory, and it doesn't need to be accurate, anyway). There are also faint references to a couple of the Ninth Doctor novels.  
This chapter's secondary title is 'Back to the Future', because even though I'm going into Rose's past, it's all technically in the future. Heh - the dilemmas of writing across time and space!  
**Credit to:** Helen (Live Journal name: **lovepollution**) for Hope's name. Because it _is_ perfect.

Thanks for the feedback so far everyone -I hope I can continue to entertain you. :)

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Part 2 - Parting of the Ways

Six years of Rose's life earlier…

"It means no."

"But she will be destroyed."

"NO!"

The Doctor could be seen shooting onto his feet through the flickering mage of the communications channel, his eyes fixed on the Dalek challenging him. Rose Tyler was the subject of debate, and was currently in a rather uncompromising position, surrounded by Daleks on the flagship of their fleet, and helpless to intervene as the Doctor, back on the Games Station, parleyed across the wide expanse of the Milky Way with her Dalek captors.

"Because this is what I'm gonna do," the Doctor continued, "I'm gonna rescue her. I'm gonna save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet and then I'm gonna save the earth, and then, just to finish off, I'm gonna wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!"

The opposing Dalek was unable to comprehend this. "But you have no weapons, no defences, no plan," it said.

"Yeah!" the Doctor rejoined with a manic smile, "and doesn't that scare you to death?"

The Dalek remained silent.

The Doctor then finally turned his attention to Rose, who was stood there alone and terrified amidst the Dalek throng. "Rose?" he said.

"Yes, Doctor?" she called, taking a step toward his image.

He smiled. "I'm coming to get you." And then, with a flick of his sonic screwdriver, his image fizzled away and Rose was left, once again, alone in the lion's den. But she had, at least, been given hope, and was now praying that the Doctor would indeed be able to achieve his goals.

The Daleks, in contrast, were suddenly alarmed by the Doctor's vows, especially the fact that he was planning to come in person to the heart of their fleet. Knowing full well that this Time Lord was a bringer of misfortune for them, they realised that they had to act fast.

"The stratagem must advance!" one Dalek reminded his comrades. "Begin the invasion of earth!"

"The Doctor will be exterminated!" another resolved.

And so they began to initiate the final stages of their long-brewing plan, bursting out in choruses of "Exterminate!" as they did so; the Doctor had pushed all the wrong buttons, and they wanted him to know about it.

The ensuing minutes crawled by like the trickling of a viscous syrup for Rose, and she could feel her heart pounding harder and harder in her chest as every second passed and excited Daleks swarmed all around her. Her eyes consistently scoured the extravagant interior of the Dalek ship, examining every nook and cranny over and over again for any sign of the TARDIS or of the Doctor.

It felt like forever until Rose finally heard it, that unmistakable blaring of sound that announced the TARDIS's arrival. Her eyes darted left and right as she felt torrents of air blasting into her, and the infamous blue box materialised just a short distance away. Little did she realise that it had just made one of the biggest cock-ups of its career, however…

---

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor kicked the control panel and swore. "Oh well this is just fantastic!" he roared, storming around the TARDIS's central column and flicking a few more switches; the plan had been for the TARDIS to land so as to have Rose end up inside the ship with both him and Captain Jack - but no, it had decided to fail, materialising but a few meagre _metres_ off target, and leaving Rose out in the deadly cold…

"The force-field will hold out," Jack said, his voice slightly downcast, as he gave his precious Extrapolator a pat. He had linked it into the TARDIS's systems to give them some vital extra protection, and it had so far proven to be a lifesaver. "It'll keep us shielded for a small range outside the TARDIS," he went on, "but still…"

"It's not enough to get to Rose!" the Doctor concluded with a disgruntled sigh. "Why now…? After all the times this machine's got it right, why does she have to get it wrong _now_!"

Jack looked equally frustrated, but was managing to keep his emotions in better check. "Well, there's nothing we can do about it at the moment, Doc', so we may as well deal with it."

The Doctor grudgingly conceded to this with a stiff nod. "You're right," he murmured, before he then turned to face the door and rolled his shoulders back. "Let's get on with it."

As he made his way out of the TARDIS, with Jack in tow, the Doctor knew that this was it - the final showdown. He was about to face his oldest and most hated of enemies all over again, but this time he had to win. He couldn't afford to lose this war. He couldn't go through that again.

As soon as he and the Captain set foot outside the TARDIS, they heard Rose scream at them from the other side of the chamber; neither of them were quite sure what she was saying, but it was doubtlessly something to do with them being crazy and telling them they should go back. Her voice was soon drained out by the chorus of Daleks, however, who simultaneously barked "Exterminate!" and unleashed a deadly volley of laser fire upon the intruders…

Rose had to turn away and cringe as she heard those death rays fly, fearing the worst, but when she heard nothing follow this but an uneasy silence, she had to look back to see what had happened, and then realised that the death-rays had simply ricocheted off some kind of invisible wall; the Doctor and Jack were still stood there, outside the TARDIS, safe and unharmed. She exhaled in relief and almost laughed, but knew that they were far from out of the woods yet.

The Doctor now opened his arms in feigned disappointment to the throng of Daleks that surrounded him, and invited them to do their worst. "Is that it?" he jeered.

The Daleks were thus rendered quiet for once, and seemed to be unsure of where to go from here, whilst the Doctor slowly looked between them all and stared right down their individual eyestalks with an audacity that would have terrified a lesser race.

Rose was expecting a speech to ensue, so was caught completely off-guard when the Doctor suddenly turned his sights on her instead. He held her gaze for a long time and, though he said not a word, Rose could see that he was trying to tell her that he was sorry. 'Please forgive me, Rose' said those pale blue eyes and placid features, and she felt a knot build in her chest. It was the face he always wore when they found themselves in tight spots during their adventures - down in Mr. Sneed's dungeon, in the Cabinet Room of Number 10, during their struggle with the Dalek beneath the Utah desert - because, every time, he had felt responsible for what was happening to her, each brush she had with death making him regret ever asking her to travel with him. And yet Rose knew that he needed her, and so, every time he became so repentant, she had to remind him that he had made the right decision in bringing her along. And so she gave him the brave face now, just as she always did, and tried to communicate to him that, no matter what happened, she would never have passed up the opportunity to be with him, and, if this was the end, then he mustn't blame himself, because he couldn't always keep her safe.

Once this silent conference had passed, the Doctor moved his sight again to take in the Daleks and racked his brain for a solution to this conundrum.

"I believe you have something of mine," he growled at the Dalek horde, his eyes seeming to burn from out of his skull as he gave them each another admonishing look.

The Daleks raised their firing arms up to him out of habit, despite the fact they were currently ineffective, and they intoned as one, "Stay where you are!"

The Doctor deigned to take a step forward anyway, whilst Jack hung back and looked around, feeling more than a little inadequate at present.

"Do you know what they called me in the ancient legends of your home world?" the Doctor asked them all.

They remained silent.

"The oncoming storm."

Still the Daleks said nothing, but Rose found the metaphor very adequate; the Doctor could indeed be a storm when he wanted to be, in those moments when he lost his self control and his rage swelled into a tempest.

"You might have had all your emotions removed," he continued, "but I reckon there's one tiny flicker of one left, deep down inside, and that's fear."

Rose looked between several of the metal totems and was certain she could discern a slight tremor of movement between them all, a slight judder of the eye-stalk or a turning of the head which indicated that maybe, just maybe, the Doctor had touched a slimy nerve somewhere deep inside their shells...

"Doesn't it just burn when you face me?"

Rose stared hard at her Doctor again and felt that if she were a Dalek right now, she'd be very afraid of the 'oncoming storm' before her.

"So tell me," he asked. "How did you survive the Time War?"

"They survived through me."

And so the Dalek Emperor finally reared his head, a great monolith of evil that appeared like a wicked spectre from the gloom, and whose great bulk effortlessly overshadowed the tiny forms of the Doctor and Captain Jack below. Rose looked on in dismay at this terrible vision and could feel herself tremble in true terror, seeing before her a Dalek of the most ghastly proportions, a creature that was a clear God amongst its brethren.

The vast monster soon began to speak, and gloated about his survival of the Time War, of his Dalek breeding programme, and of how he had slowly infiltrated the human race over hundreds of years - but Rose didn't hear any of it. She knew that the creature was speaking, and she could hear its words passing by her ears, but none of it registered; she was far too lost in her own thoughts and fears to be able to concentrate. Her eyes were fixed on the back of the Doctor's head whilst the Time Lord listened to the Emperor's every word (and intermittently interrupted), because all she could think about right now was _him_. She'd been on so many wondrous adventures with him, had experienced Victorian London, the end of the world, escaped the prison planets of Justicia, and battled both the Slitheen and the Blathereen by his side, but never had she felt so sure as she now did that this might be the end. It truly felt like they had gotten themselves into a situation from which they would never escape.

Rose felt a tear roll down her face as this defeat sank in - all she truly wanted at the moment was for that colossal monster of a Dalek to shut up, to just stop talking, and for the Doctor to find a solution, like he always did, and then come running to her, take her by the hand, and lead both her and Jack away to safety. She wanted him out of harm's way, more than anything else, though - if she could just have that, then she would be happy. But who was she trying to kid…?

"I offer you a pact, Time Lord," Rose then heard the Dalek Emperor grumble as she brought herself back to the situation at hand; "An exchange, if you will."

The Doctor's eyes were as cold as ice as he glared at this fiendish despot. "And what might that be?"

The Emperor paused a moment, almost as if to gloat and to savour every second of what he presumed was an impending victory. "That I shall return your accomplice to you," he said, indicating Rose with a wave of one, slimy tentacle, "If you give up your time machine in return. The human for the time machine. A fair exchange."

The Doctor's mouth dropped open as he took this in, before he then turned to look at Rose, whilst, behind him, poor old Jack looked equally distraught; he hated being reduced to nothing but a helpless spectator.

"Surrender to us your TARDIS," the Dalek Emperor stated for a second time, "and we shall spare your associate."

The Doctor's face paled yet further, and all he could do was stand there swaying on his unsteady feet as he pondered on the sheer magnitude of this decision. How was he meant to make a choice like this? How many times would he have to face this emotional torment? Was this why he had refused a companion for so long before Rose? Had he sacrificed his communal needs to avoid scenes like this, where he was threatened with the life of one whom he cared about so deeply?

/'What use are emotions if you will not save the woman you love?'/

"If I say yes," he murmured at last, turning his eyes from Rose to stare again at the Emperor, "Then what shall you do with Rose? What shall you do with 'my associate'?"

He and the God-like Dalek stared long and hard at each other, until the Emperor said, "We shall spare her."

The Doctor blinked slowly. "And what does that mean?" he asked. "Will she be safe?"

The Emperor did not answer, but the Doctor could see from the glint in his great, bulbous eye that he could not be trusted.

"My TARDIS answers to me alone," the Doctor went on. "If I gave her up, she would not operate for you."

"Then we shall keep you alive," the Emperor replied, with a hint of satisfaction, "so that you can _make _it work."

The Doctor swallowed and heaved a great sigh, staring down at his feet.

"Doctor," Jack murmured from behind. "You can't--"

"Don't tell me what I can and cannot do right now, Jack!" the Doctor snapped, and the Captain was stunned into silence as he found himself on the end of one of the Time Lord's most tempestuous glares; the man was powerful and dangerous, and it had taken Jack up until that moment to truly feel the force of that fact.

"Let me offer _you_ a deal," the Doctor then declared as he turned back to look at the gigantic Dalek overlord. "I'll give you my time machine in exchange for Rose, but you must also agree to give me one final request."

The Emperor might have smirked if he'd had a mouth with which to do so. "And what would that be, Time Lord?"

"That you let me send both Rose and my friend Captain Jack here" - he gestured at Jack - "away as well. Away through time."

"NO!"

The Doctor didn't turn as Rose and Jack yelled at him in unison. He couldn't bear it.

The Emperor guffawed in the most terrible of voices. "Then I grant you your vain wish, Time Lord. Now step away from the TARDIS."

The Doctor's brow furrowed. "Why?"

"Our stratagem is nearing completion. I would like you to be my guest in observing this most wonderful of events, the final destruction of the earth. And then you can sit back and watch it all over again when we use the technology of your time machine to go back and destroy the human race right from the start."

"But why? It makes no sense!" the Doctor yelled.

"It makes sense to the Dalek race, Doctor," the Emperor hissed. "The whole of creation is now at our mercy, thanks to you. We shall soon be the sole species of the universe. Before long, there shall be only Daleks. The Time War is ours!"

The Doctor stared at this malevolent mass of raw flesh in horror, but knew that he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He could also see, out of the corner of his eye, that Rose was being threatened by the prod of a Dalek's laser arm, prompting him to act, so he just did as he was told and paced away from his precious TARDIS, then walked to her side. As he reached her and took her hand, Jack then too began to follow, but was suddenly rounded on by a pair of Daleks and held at bay.

"Stay where you are!" they rattled at him in their staccato tones.

"Why?" Jack asked, his hands going up into the air. "What have I done?"

"You are insurance," the Emperor's voice sneered from the gloom. "To make sure that the Doctor doesn't get any ideas whilst we wait. Do not worry, Doctor - it shall not take us long to reach the earth."

The Doctor gave Jack a lingering and apologetic look, whilst Rose looked equally frightened for him, until, with a couple of insistent prods, the Time Lord and his companion were shepherded away, down corridor after corridor, and imprisoned in a small cell.

----

The door hissed shut behind both the Doctor and Rose, and he just stood there in silence for what seemed like ages until he collapsed back against the door and slid down into a resigned heap on the floor. "Oh Rose," he lamented, the weight of the universe on his shoulders, "What have I done?"

Rose felt terrible - all this was her fault; her entire race may now cease to exist because of _her_. Part of her prayed that, even if she was to be 'spared' now, she wouldn't live much longer to remember all this. "Why did you do it?" she asked as she sat before him on her knees and looked him in the eyes. He wouldn't meet her gaze, though, nor would he say a word; he just looked away with a most despairing and severe expression upon his countenance.

Rose sighed and reached out for his shoulder, hoping to pacify him, but he just shrugged her off. It was a weak shrug, though, and she soon realised that he was crying; he was understandably broken and shattered within, but worse, he was reliving a Hell that he thought he had seen the back of. "All over again," he kept whispering to himself in-between chokes and sobs, "I can't allow this to happen again."

He then hung his head and just let the tears come whilst Rose shifted to his side and put her arm around him. She was certain that he was talking about the death of his planet and of the loss of his people, but as much as she desired to comfort him, she hadn't a clue what to say; what could one say to a man who had lost everything? So she just settled with holding him.

"There must be a way," she whispered at length. "There must be something we can do."

The Doctor managed to collect himself a little after a while, and just leant his head back against the door, angling his chin up toward the ceiling. "I don't know," he sighed. "I've been looking for a loophole in this situation since the start, and am just hoping I can get everyone out of this mess. There has to be a way, but the possibilities of succeeding are just so remote, so tiny, that…" His words faltered.

"But anything's worth a try, isn't it?" Rose asked. "No matter how slim the chances are."

The Doctor's eyes turned on her and he gave her a faint smile. "Of course anything's worth a try. It's worth dying for, and I shall die if it saves your people and your planet, and--"

He hesitated as he stared at her then, his mouth gaping for a second as he tried to force the words out. "And if it saves you," he finally added.

Rose stared long and hard at him in return, feeling a thrill run through her body as their eyes connected, and yet she couldn't help but feel a little wretched right now, too. "Please don't send me away," she implored, clutching at his leather jacket. "I can't bear the thought of not being here…"

He swallowed and glanced up at the ceiling again. "I can't bear the thought of you dying, either, Rose. You must live."

"And what about my thoughts? My feelings? Do you think I want to leave you here, to face torture, or worse, alone?"

"I promised to protect you…"

"But you can't protect me from everything!"

He looked back at her again and slowly shook his head. "But I can protect you from this."

They stared at one another again.

"Please let me," he then added huskily.

Rose could do nothing but stare back, powerless; she knew she could not sway him, and it pained her so much that she soon felt the tears come rolling down her cheeks, as her throat tightened and her heart wrenched. "But you can't give in to them," she cried, shaking her head and trying to wipe away the tears. "You can't let this happen. You can't die!"

The Doctor's hearts filled with both pity and regret as he watched her, and he soon placed his arm round her shoulders and clasped her toward him. "I'm sorry Rose," he whispered, before he buried his nose in her hair and closed his eyes, trying to prevent himself from thinking about the horrors which lay ahead. "Please forgive me."

She embraced him in return and let her tears calm, before she then moved her head back to look up at him properly. Their eyes met and they were suddenly so close to each other that their noses almost touched. And so, without another word, Rose simply followed her heart, closed the gap between them, and pressed her lips against his.

The Doctor was a bit hesitant at first, and a bit shocked, though he knew this was hardly something unexpected, but it wasn't long until he began kissing her in return. For so long they had been waiting for this, but had not allowed it, had felt the passion, but kept it contained, so that by now, when it seemed that they might never see one another again, their need to show the true extent of their affection for one another had intensified tenfold. If this was to be their last night together, then what had they to lose?

Rose groaned as she felt the Doctor's hand slide up and down her back, and she held him as close to her as she could, snaking her arms about his neck and pressing herself against him. She soon felt herself lowered onto the floor, her back touching the cool metal beneath her, whilst the Doctor stood over her on all fours and kissed her again softly. Rose couldn't be doing with his coyness now, though, so she reached up and pulled him gently down on top of her and then just held him there, wishing she could hold him like this forever.

After several minutes of this kissing and cuddling, the Doctor paused and, breaking his lips from Rose's, took a few breaths and gently rested his forehead against hers. He was trying to collect his thoughts and was pondering on where to go from here, and even wondering whether he should.

Rose watched him carefully in turn, feeling one of his hands caress her belly as he thought on this. By the look in his eyes, as his gaze then met hers, and by the uncertain motion of his hands, Rose could see that he was trying to ask her a question: 'Do you want this, Rose?' he was saying, 'Is this right? Can we do this when so much is at stake?'

Rose hesitated a little and glanced down, her hands roving up and down his back until she made her decision. She then looked back up into his eyes and gave him a slight smile before she tightened her grip on him and clutched him more closely into her. She felt a tremor run through his body at this point, and she knew that he wanted her, but there was still that uncertainty in his mind of whether it was right and of whether he could do this to her, could offer her the prospects of a relationship that he knew he might never be able to fulfil. He had promised to protect her after all - would this, therefore, count as acting completely contrary to his promise? Would this just be selfish?

Rose in turn knew of his dilemma and of his concerns for her, but she wanted to make him understand that there were some things that he could have no control over, and that his feelings weren't something he should shun or curb, but embrace. She consequently reached up to stroke his cheek, and watched him as he turned his face into her hand and pressed his lips against her palm, before she gave him an encouraging smile and whispered, "I love you."

The Doctor stared back at her again for some time as he processed this, and ran a finger down the side of her face whilst his mind battled with itself over what to do. It was as Rose ran her fingers through his short, cropped hair and he looked again into her large, brown eyes that he came to his decision.

And so the Doctor lowered his lips down to Rose's face and kissed her again, but with much more intensity, for he had decided that it was time he showed her that he loved her, too…

----

There was no goodbye when Rose awoke, though. She had no idea how the Doctor had done it, but the next thing she knew, she was waking up in the stairwell of her block of flats on the Powell Estate. A cold wash of terror flushed through her body and she shot to her feet, looking herself over. She was fully dressed again, though her TARDIS key was gone, but--

"Oh my God…" Rose gasped as her heart made a nervous pop - it hadn't been a dream, had it? She ran her fingers gingerly over the skin of her neck and felt a slight mark there, a red sore where the Doctor had kissed her too hard. It had happened, there was no doubt, but he wasn't here now.

She looked around herself groggily as she took all this in, recollections of her 'night' with the Doctor, of the situation with the Daleks, of the fact she was back home again, and--

She heard a groan from the stairs leading down and turned to see Jack laid halfway down the next flight of concrete steps. She might have smiled if the situation wasn't so grim.

She quickly paced down the steps and gave his body a shake. "Jack," she said softly, wiping away the tears from her face as he stirred. "Come on, wake up."

After a few seconds, Jack opened his eyes and looked around himself blearily before it all clicked. "The bastard!" he shouted as he leapt onto his feet, then, failing to realise he was on uneven ground, lost his balance and tripped down the stairs.

Rose paced down the steps and helped him get to his feet again from the next landing down. He then stared at her in horror. "The bastard, he did it…" he gasped, "My God, Rose, he really did it."

They both were both filled with a helpless rage, a terrible knowledge that they could do nothing to help their greatest friend, and the tears were soon as much in Jack's eyes as in Rose's. "Oh Rose," Jack sighed again. "What has he done?"

Rose shook her head and bit her lip before a choked cry escaped her, and she felt Jack's arms come around her in a comforting embrace; both their hearts were as heavy as leaden weights, their minds two masses of confusion and loss; how had the Doctor done it? Or how had the Daleks done it? Had he really given himself up to them, along with his time machine? Had the earth really been destroyed in the far future by the Dalek fleet, and did it now look set to be destroyed all over again in the past? But surely, if the Daleks had succeeded in obliterating the human race in the past, there would be no twenty-first century right here and now? How long would it take them to do it? When would the past be changed? When would the world turn dark and everyone fade away? _How _would it happen? Would they all just wither into dust? Would the Reapers return to sterilise another wound in time and destroy an era that would soon never have existed? Rose didn't know, but as she held onto Jack, these thoughts were hardly at the forefront of her mind - she soon realised that, as big as these questions were, she was only crying because she missed and wanted the Doctor.

After she and Jack had had a few moments to collect themselves, they then slowly drew apart and Rose began to lead Jack up the stairs and toward her flat…

TBC…


	3. Home

**Notes: **Many thanks for all the feedback guys! It really helps! This part has yet to be beta-read by my beta, but it shouldn't change too much once it has.I thought I'd publish it before you all thought I'd abandoned it, or something! Enjoy. Domesticity, here we come!** -Juri'**

* * *

**Part 3 - Home**

When Jackie Tyler opened the door to see her daughter stood there with a handsome stranger, and both of them with red eyes and drawn faces, she didn't know what to think. She thought that it was best _not _to think for the moment, though - all the questions and explanations could wait. The most important thing was that her daughter was home, and that she was safe - so she simply opened her arms and embraced Rose.

Rose leant into the hug in turn and clutched onto her mother tightly. Her mind was still a mass of loose ends, one confused metropolis of unanswered questions and dreadful fears, and a shoulder to cry on was what she needed right now; she knew that she would never be able to ground her thoughts and think clearly until her tears were ousted. Her whole world had just been pulled from beneath her feet, after all…

"Thank God," Jackie sighed after a long, contented hug, whilst Jack hung about a little awkwardly in the rear. "It's been weeks, Rose, weeks and weeks… I worry so much."

Rose finally pulled away from her mum and wiped her eyes, and mother and daughter then just stared hard at one another.

"What is it?" Jackie asked. "What's happened?"

Rose swallowed and shook her head. "I don't know…" she murmured candidly.

Jackie only made a short nod in return; it was clear that a certain man in a battered leather jacket was absent, though, and that, coupled with Rose's tears could only be significant. She quickly ushered Rose and the stranger inside, then closed the door after them.

"Are you going to introduce your friend, then, Rose?" Jackie asked as she looked at the unknown man once more, who, she noted with great curiosity, seemed to be inspecting the flat as if he had never seen anything like it before.

Captain Jack gave Rose's mother an apologetic look and, fighting down his current despondency, quickly recalled his courtesy and offered her his hand; "Forgive me - I'm Captain Jack Harkness."

Jackie rose an eyebrow at him before she hesitantly placed her hand in his and gave it a shake. "Is he another one of your aliens?" she then asked Rose.

Rose half-heartedly shook her head. "No… he's human, just from the a fifty-first century."

Jackie wasn't sure whether or not to be surprised by this, though it was difficult to treat it with as cool a disregard as Rose had shown. She decided to just flash the Captain a nervous smile in the end.

"You must be Rose's mom," Jack continued, giving her hand another firm shake. "Nice to meet you, Mrs…?"

She wafted a hand at him and suddenly realised how handsome he was. "Call me Jackie," she said.

He nodded. "Very well, nice to meet you, Jackie."

Jackie gave her daughter another significant look before she then turned and led them both into the lounge. "Well, as you can see," she said, picking up the _Heat _magazines from the sofa and collecting a pair of used mugs from the coffee table, "I'm completely unprepared for your visit. Can't you give me a ring to let me know when you're coming next time?"

Rose sighed, her mother's routine manner serving to irritate her to high heaven. She kept her cool, though, despite the circumstances, and ignoring her mother, offered Jack an armchair. "Sit down," she said.

Jack gave her a nod of thanks and lowered himself into the seat, whilst Jackie walked off into the kitchen and began rinsing the mugs out beneath the tap. "Do you and your Captain want a drink, then?" she asked.

Rose slumped onto the sofa and looked to Jack, who made a resigned shrug in return. "Might as well," he said. "I need waking up."

"Yeah, sure mum," Rose called back.

Jackie didn't say anything in return; the despondency in both Rose and this Jack's manner was as tangible to her as the flat they now stood in, and it frightened her a little. She was curious to hear about what had happened to them, but so far the two of them seemed very reluctant to even begin to touch upon the topic…

Jackie cast this aside for a moment and soon returned with a cup of coffee for each of them, before she took a seat in the free armchair and waited for the start of an explanation to arise.

Nothing but a tense silence ensued, however, and Jackie found her eyes darting between her daughter and the fifty-first century man. Neither of them seemed to have any inclination to speak; they just stared point-blank at their mugs in complete silence, wrapped up in their own little worlds.

Jackie at last shook her head, feeling utterly exasperated. "Well, then, where is he? Where's that Doctor of yours?"

Rose looked up and met her mother's eyes; her mind was still buzzing over recent events and she didn't know where to start, nor how to start. She couldn't even think straight.

"Well?" Jackie pushed on. "What's happened?"

Rose looked away and suddenly felt like she was burning up from inside, and her anxiety began to boil over into a rather savage rage; "Well he's obviously not 'ere, is he, mum?" she snapped, though a little more aggressively than she'd quite intended.

Jackie rolled her eyes. "Don't you go throwing your hormones round at me. The hours I've spent sitting here, waiting for you to come back, hoping that you're okay, and--"

Rose ran her fingers through her hair. "All right, mum, I'm sorry," she interrupted. "It's just… Well…" She had to stop there, though - it was all too much to take in, and she just dropped her head into her hands.

Jackie glanced at Captain Jack, but he only offered her a rather miserable look in return, so she paced over to her daughter and held her in her arms, stroking her hair and trying to soothe her. "For God's sake" she said. "What's happened?"

Jack exhaled slowly as he tried to collect his thoughts, and leant forwards upon his knees, his hands clasped before him. For some reason, seeing Rose in such a state of hysteria, and quite clearly not herself, really unnerved him - it just showed how bad things must have become…

"It's hard to explain," he said at last, "But to cut to the chase, young Rose there was captured by a race of aliens called the Daleks. Turned out these creatures had been shaping the human race for hundreds of years, moulding them to it's will, but I digress… They captured Rose so that they could use her as ransom against the Doctor. The bargain was Rose for his time machine. Now the Doc' cares for Rose and there was no way he was gonna let her come to harm, but he couldn't just agree to their demands because that looked likely to mean that the whole human race would be wiped out."

Jackie was just staring at Captain Jack in utter incredulity - perhaps more because she could hardly get her head round what he was saying rather than the fact she was appalled by the account.

"So the Doc' went about saving Rose…" Jack continued, "but his plan failed, and he had to make a choice. Last thing Rose and I knew, he had agreed to give up his time machine, but only on the account that we were to be kept safe and sent away through time. And so, here we are now, a long way from him and without a clue of what he was planning to do." Jack shook his head and stared at the floor. "We don't even know if he's still alive."

"But you're safe," Jackie whispered at length. "He kept you safe. Oh thank God he sent you back to me."

Jack watched as Jackie hugged her daughter again, as tightly as she could; he wished that the lady was right and that he could tell her they were all safe, but considering the fact that the Daleks might have gotten their hypothetical hands on the Doctor's time machine meant that they were far from safe. It would only be a matter of time…

----

The rest of the day was spent in an unglamorous fashion as both Rose and the Captain tried to come to terms with their loss, and with their being suddenly marooned back in the year 2006. When the evening finally came, Jack was offered the sofa for the night whilst Rose retired to her pink room with the pink duvet and the pink curtains, and was reminded, unwillingly, about her life before the Doctor.

As she climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling through the dark, Rose found that she simply could not sleep. Her mind was fraught with thoughts and images and, as tired as she admittedly was, she just couldn't rest. Just knowing that the Doctor was out there in the future, all alone, and that she was back here, lying in bed and doing nothing, made her feel so useless and so inadequate that she just wanted to scream.

And it wasn't long until it all came rolling back in flashbacks, every images and memory from her recent misadventure: the Anne Droid, the people being 'disintegrated', the swarms of Daleks, the Doctor…

Rose snuggled a little further beneath her covers as if this might offer her some respite. Oh God, the Doctor… Was he still alive? Was he okay? Would she ever even see him again…? That terrible thought brought a tear to her eye and made her spine tingle in dread. Had their night in the cell truly been their last ever encounter?

She swallowed; her and the Doctor, laid naked in each other's arms; his eyes on her face, his hands on her body, his lips on her skin. Her and the Doctor, finally showing their love for one another. The last thing she could remember was settling by his side and laying her head atop his chest as she drifted into a bittersweet slumber.

No wait… she could recall something else. As the haze of sleep had cast itself over her, she was certain that she had heard the Doctor's voice whisper down to her, "Have a good life, Rose. Have a fantastic life." It had almost been a farewell…

But had he really said that, or had she dreamt it? She wasn't sure, but she treasured the words anyway (even if she would like to go back now and tell him that she would have no life if he wasn't to be a part of it).

Now that sounded corny she thought a second later. The Doctor would probably flash her one of his great grins, chuckle a little and ask her what she'd done with Rose Tyler if she told him that.

She thus almost smiled, but she just couldn't permit it, so ended up heaving another great sigh and rolling over several times before she realised she wasn't going to be able to get to sleep anytime soon. She eventually opted to throw her duvet off her body and lurch across to the window, where she leant on the sill and stared out into the night sky. Everything was so normal, it almost affronted her, from the flickering street lamps to the whining of distant police sirens, and from the dog barking nearby to the sound of a young couple downstairs having a row. It was just… not enough. Not anymore.

And then, leaping from out of her mire of memories like a beacon in the fog, Rose began to hear words from the past, words she had almost forgotten:

/'Now forget me, Rose Tyler. Go home.'/

She ran her hand through her long, blonde hair and thought on this. "But I can't forget you," she eventually whispered to the void. "And I can't go home. Not any more."

TBC…


	4. Disorder

**Notes: **Maybe I ought to mention that my only background knowledge for _Doctor Who_ comes from what I've seen on TV, in the new series. I've read a few fics that mention 'Looms of Gallifrey' and stuff, and that all made me wonder whether my story was possible or not, but hey - this is an AU, and I'm going on what I know. Just thought I'd say that in case anyone else is well clued-up on their _Who_ history and wants to tell me off. :)

This chappie is _sans_ beta again. Naughty me.

* * *

Part 4 - Disorder

The days from then on passed slowly and painfully, and Rose spent them in what could only be called a state of apathy. This wasn't like the Rose that Jackie knew at all, though, so it all quickly became an irritant to her. It therefore wasn't long until, one morning, Jackie confronted her daughter head on and said, "You need to sort your life out, sweetheart. This has gone on long enough."

Rose looked up at her mother from where she was slouched on the sofa in her dressing gown, watching the presenters on some lifestyle show on the telly talk about bikini diets. She was quite certain that she had nothing to live for anymore, however; she very well knew that she _needed_ to do something, rather than sit here wasting her life away, but how could she…? How could one follow up living in a time machine with a Time Lord? How was she supposed to pick up the pieces and start over?

"Captain Jack's moved on a little," Jackie continued. "You can too."

Rose rolled her eyes and regarded her mother with disbelief. "Jack used to be a Time Agent," she said. "He's a professional, mum, and… well, he's probably better at coping with this sorta thing. He lost two years of his memory once. If he can deal with that, he can deal with anythin'."

"Then I'm sure you can have a go, too. This isn't like you, Rose."

Rose ignored her mum for the moment whilst she flicked the channel on the TV and found a gardening programme on BBC1, which was a little more interesting than the bikini people. "It's not that easy," she quietly protested before she cast the TV remote aside and exhaled deeply.

In the past few weeks that both she and the Captain had been 'home', here in London 2006, Jack (with his usual flirtatious gusto) had gotten to know a young man who lived upstairs very well, a pretty-boy named Eugene. In fact, so well had he gotten to know him that their friendship had become a relationship and the Captain had since moved in. On top of that, and with Eugene's help, Jack had also secured a small job at a local petrol station, serving behind the counter, and the station claimed that, since his appointment, business had increased threefold! Jack knew that it wasn't much, especially compared to what he had been doing before, and he hardly liked living in the twenty-first century, but it was something; it was a life. And, besides, he couldn't do much else right now, could he?

To be honest, Rose wasn't quite sure how Jack had managed to pick up his feet and 'carry on'; she guessed that he must simply be a much more adaptable person than she was, and that he was a natural survivor. Jack gave off the impression that he could be thrown into any era of time and, no matter what, would always manage to blend in sooner than you could say Raxacoricofallapatorious. But she just couldn't carry on like he could. Everything came down to comparisons for her; she was always thinking of what she should be doing rather than what she could. For instance, she often thought that she _should _be helping the Doctor fight his war in the future, but forgot the fact that she _couldn't_, and she thought that she _should _be back in the TARDIS, travelling by the Doctor's side again, but failed to face the fact that she simply _couldn't_… This was all that occupied her mind, day and night, and though it wasn't healthy, she couldn't help but think that way. Her mum kept trying desperately to drag her to the Job Centre, but Rose just couldn't do it; she was stuck in a rut that only she could get herself out of it… and it didn't look like she would be climbing out any time soon.

"Well you can't stay on the dole forever," Jackie also consistently reminded her. "You're better than that, Rose."

After this usual morning chitchat, Jackie then departed to do some shopping in town (Marks and Sparks had a good sale on, apparently) and Rose was left alone with the people on the telly who were planting trees and installing mini water fountains. She indulged herself with a deep sigh before she reached again for the remote and was about to flick the channel when she suddenly felt her stomach lurch and the bile come rushing up her throat. Swearing, she leapt from her seat and rushed into the bathroom, where she subsequently hurled down the toilet.

After the unexpected surge seemed to stop, Rose then slumped next to the sink and wiped her suddenly sweaty forehead. That was twice in two days she had been sick, now. It did her head in.

Casting this aside, she clambered back to her feet and decided to go back to bed.

----

A couple of days later, Rose's illness seemed to have gotten worse, and it wasn't long until Jackie noticed the recurring vomiting sessions. "Well, if you can't get yourself down to that Job Centre, then I'll be damned if you can't get yourself to the doctors' and get that sorted," she said another morning as the people on the lifestyle show had moved on to chatting about seafood diets.

Rose glared blearily at the plates of clams and lobsters that were flashing across the TV screen and had to suppress the need to heave again. "I'm fine, mum," she grumbled. "It's probably a withdrawal effect from time-travelling or summit."

Jackie looked less than convinced. "Oh, I see. Has your Captain friend been chucking-up daily, too?"

Rose gave her mum a dark stare then returned her eyes to the telly and pretended to be interested in the shrimp cocktails. "No, but he's a --"

"'Professional'," Jackie interceded. "Yes, I know. Don't see why that excuses him from any side-effects, though. From what I can tell, you're lovesick and you need to snap out of it and come back into the real world."

The dangerous subject had been breached and Rose couldn't be bothered to talk about it. Conversations with her mum about the Doctor never went very well - so she got up and just went back to bed again.

----

Another few days later the sickness was still there and Rose looked the worse for wear. It was Jack who was sitting in the lounge of the Tylers' flat this morning with a rather pasty-faced Rose, and they were both watching (with varying degrees of attention) the people on the lifestyle show argue about the effectiveness of a protein diet.

"What a load of rubbish," Jack chuckled after a while, before he flicked the channel over to the BBC gardening programme and turned to Rose. "So, Roseykins, heard you're not doin' too well?"

Rose, again in her dressing gown, stared daggers at him from her slumped position on the sofa. "Don't you dare call me 'Roseykins', Jack-Flash."

"Look, who is Jack-Flash?"

Rose wafted a hand at him, and turned her eyes back to the telly. "You got a day off work, then?" she asked a moment later.

"Yup. And Eugene's gone down to Southampton to see his mom for a few days, so I'm all alone."

"Poor Jack."

"It's tragic, isn't it?"

They both smiled and watched a man plant a rhododendron on the gardening show.

"Where's your mom got to, whilst we're on the subject?" the Captain continued.

Rose sighed and shifted into a more comfortable slouch. "Dunno… might hav' gone out with Colleen from downstairs." Rose glanced at Jack. "Colleen's a good mate of hers, and she's expecting her first baby soon. Mum probably wants to help her get all the baby's stuff or summit. She loves interfering, my mum."

Jack smiled widely again. "I can believe it."

Rose looked back to the gardening show and then found herself rubbing her temples as a slight headache began to emerge.

"Rose, I'm worried about you," Jack suddenly said in his most brotherly of tones. "You're not well. You stay home most days, you don't do anything, and you keep vomiting, which isn't good no matter which way you look at it."

"Jack…" she sighed.

"I just want you to be all right. I know things have been tough, and, gee, they still ain't easy for me, despite what you might think… but we can get through this. Let me and your mom help you, Rosey, because you're not helping yourself."

Rose took another deep breath before she reluctantly turned her eyes once again onto Jack. "Okay, I'll go to the doctors', I'll try to find a job, you name it - but you've gotta promise me one thing."

"Name it, girl."

"That you never call me 'Rosey', 'Roseykins', or any other stupid variation of 'Rose' ever again."

Jack grinned. "Aww…. You not the pet-name-type?"

"_Promise_."

He tittered and threw her a wink. "Captain's honour."

----

Rose managed to squeeze herself into the chockablock list of appointments at her local surgery the following morning, so she couldn't stay home to see what diets were fashionable on today's lifestyle show, or tune in for any tips on trimming her evergreens. She did feel depressingly normal, though, when she sat in that waiting room amongst the squealing children, coughing old men and expectant mothers; here she was, back with the rest of the 'stupid apes' that made up the human race, and there was nothing she could do about it…

God, why couldn't she escape this funk…?

She stared at the door which led through to the rest of the surgery, at which a GP or nurse would appear every few minutes to call the next patient through. "Mr. C. Lawrenson", "Mrs. P. Taylor", "Mr. J. Smith" (there was quite a commotion at this when three Mr. J. Smiths claimed the slot) and then, finally, "Miss. R. Tyler?"

'That's me' Rose thought as she looked up and saw a portly female doctor stood in the doorway, a woman who had a bundle of red hair tied back into a bun and an abundance of freckles upon her pleasant countenance. Dragging herself off her seat and toward the lady, Rose was then led down a corridor, past a man walking on crutches and a couple of kids with ball-bearings up their nostrils, before then being shown into Room 6 and offered a seat.

"Nice morning isn't it?" the doctor said amiably whilst she looked through Rose's medical records on her desk.

"Yes," Rose nodded, glancing about herself at the various posters on the white walls, some about flu jabs and others concerning the signs of meningitis; suddenly she felt extremely self-conscious - she wasn't quite sure what she was going to say now she was here, and even worse, she feared what it was that she might be diagnosed with. 'Time-travelling withdrawal' wasn't something she was sure these doctors were taught to recognise, if it indeed existed at all.

"My name's Doctor Fletcher," the woman said after a moment, giving Rose another kind look. "I notice that we haven't seen you for a while. A healthy girl, I presume?"

"I like to think so."

Doctor Fletcher smiled in a way that Rose could only call maternal. "Excellent, excellent," she said. "And what is it that we can do for you today?"

Rose dithered and began fidgeting. "I'm… not sure. Well, the thing is, I keep being sick. Like every day."

"Do you bring up blood?"

"No."

"Does it happen regularly?"

"Usually once or twice in the morning."

The doctor typed away at her computer, nodding. "Any other symptoms?"

Rose tried to think. "I don't know, really… My mum thinks I'm a lot moodier, but then she would say that. I haven't been back home for long."

"Ah, been away at university?"

"No, I've been--" Rose paused. "Travelling."

"Wonderful. Been to see the world?"

"Yeah," Rose nodded. ('And then some' she thought.)

Doctor Fletcher went on to talk amicably to her about a holiday she'd had to Egypt several years ago whilst she checked Rose's blood pressure, her weight and height, and then asked her about her diet, her lifestyle and her menstrual cycles. She then just sat and typed a few more things up on her computer. "Well you do seem to be a very healthy young woman," she said with a smile, "and I see little reason for this to be anything of too much concern. No disease or infection, at least." She then turned to face Rose head on, and Rose thought that perhaps it _was_ some kind time-travel withdrawal thing after all, something that these GPs couldn't detect… until Doctor Fletcher asked, "There isn't any chance you might be pregnant, is there?"

Rose's face dropped. There was a word on the tip of her tongue that began with 'S' that begged to be said, but she quickly reformed it into, "Sugar…" as her face flushed red and her stomach made a terrified lurch. Now that she thought about it, the puzzle pieces for that equation _did_ seem to fit…

The doctor was as calm as ever, though, and Rose was certain she must have to deal with stuff like this every day. "Shall we do a blood test?" she asked with a smile.

TBC…


	5. Mongrel

**Notes:** I know some of you are dying to see the Doctor, but it might be a few more chapters before we see him again. I think it works better that way, but I'll apologise for the wait, anyway. :) This part beautifully beta-read by **X-Wing Ace** and **Kali** from Live Journal. My thanks to them.

* * *

**Part 5 - Mongrel**

Rose was so numb with shock as she walked home that she didn't quite realise how far she'd come before she suddenly found herself standing at her front door. She fumbled with the key in the lock several times before she finally got the door open. She chucked her keys on the side and, mooching through to the lounge, slowly sank into an armchair and sat staring at the blank screen of the TV. Her blood sample had gone away for testing and she would get the results in a few days, but still. It did all add up, didn't it? She couldn't believe that she hadn't thought of it before - but, then again, she really hadn't expected it.; it wasn't the first thing one thought about, especially when there was a chance that the man you loved might be dead right now.

She wiped a couple of tears from her eyes then chewed on her lip - what was she going to do? How was she going to explain this to her mum? She tried to play out the conversation in her head, but it ended up with her mum shouting at her every time. She wouldn't get off lightly on this one, if at all.

The hand on the clock moved round from eleven to twelve and still Rose remained sat in her armchair, staring at the TV. At a quarter to one, there was a knock at the door, and she ambled off to find Jack outside with a box of chocolates in his hand and a huge smile on his face.

"All right, sweetheart?" he said before he handed her the sweets and patted her lightly on the shoulder. "Just come off my shift and thought you deserved a treat."

Rose smiled at him and glanced at the box. "Thanks, Jack," she said, "Come on in."

"Your mum not home?"

"Nope. Out with Colleen again."

"Not getting broody, is she?"

She'd better be' Rose almost retorted as she closed the door behind Jack and made her way into the kitchen. "Tea or coffee?" she asked, placing her chocolates on the side.

"How about Jack-Flash' makes the tea," he said as he followed her, "whilst the young lady takes a seat?"

Rose gave him another small smile. "Fine by me," she said and walked back into the living room, sprawling herself across the sofa.

She listened to the chinking of mugs and the opening and closing of the fridge as the Captain made them both a cuppa, and she unconsciously twirled a finger in her hair, coiling and uncoiling it in turn as her thoughts wandered once again.

"So," Jack said as he came back into the room and handed a mug to Rose, "How'd it go at the quacks'?"

Rose took a sip from her mug and tried to think of how to break the news to Jack. No doubt he'd take things a lot calmer than her mum would, but still. Having a baby meant he'd work out the rest of the tale, too, and she wasn't sure how he'd take it. "It went okay," she said at last.

"What's wrong, then?" he pushed on, taking a seat, "You don't look too thrilled."

She exhaled heavily. "It's just a bit of a shock, that's all."

"What is?"

"I've got a... big problem."

"I thought you said it went all right?"

"It did, it's just --" Rose stopped and tried to think of what to say next whilst Jack's increasingly concerned countenance only seemed to make things more difficult for her. After a while she just sighed another time and looked down into her mug. "I don't know what to do."

"Spill it, Rose, or the Psychic Paper might have to come out."

She smiled weakly at him for a second then blurted, "Jack, I might be pregnant."

Jack looked stunned. "No way," he murmured before he slouched back in his seat and stared at her as the rest of the equation began to fall into place. "But how?"

Rose gave him a long, lingering look, watching his face until she could see he had come to the only possible conclusion.

"The Doctor?" he asked with a furrowed brow.

She nodded slowly then waited for Jack's reaction.

The Captain was, at first, just astonished, but he seemed to come to terms with the idea quite quickly and, with a smile that made Rose feel so much better, he just said, "I can't believe you didn't tell me!"

Rose laughed at him, a proper laugh, which cheered Jack up no end. "Hey, there's my Rose!" he chuckled, inclining his head toward her, "Never thought I'd see you smile again."

She smirked for a little longer before the good feeling faded and the harsh reality of things set back in. "But this isn't a laughing matter," she murmured, "What am I going to do?"

Jack gave her a long and thoughtful look before he said, in his most rational of tones, "Look, this is big stuff, and we'll need to do some serious talking and thinking later on, but right now there's only one thing you need to ask yourself, and that's what do you want?" He nodded at her, sat back, and finished off his tea.

Rose sat there for several minutes thinking on this, her hand unconsciously running over her flat belly as she did so.

"So tell me, when did this happen, this consummation'?" Jack continued as he placed his empty mug by his feet and folded his arms behind his head. "I'm curious."

She ran her fingers through her hair. "That last night on the Dalek ship."

Jack tittered. "So you made out in a Dalek prison cell? God, why hadn't I been marshalled off with you? We could have had some fun."

Rose took up the nearest cushion and tossed it at him. "Jack!" she said in a feigned outrage.

He dodged the cushion and held his hands up. "Hey, I'm kidding! I'm glad I wasn't there or you two would never have got it on."

She sighed and shook her head. "Yeah, but now what? I might never see him again. And now Ive got this" - here she tapped her belly - "to think about on top of worrying about him."

Jack paused and chewed on his tongue for a moment. "It's your life, Rose. You do what you want with it."

"Yeah, but I can't do what I want. I want to be back with him again, with both of you, travelling in the TARDIS." She angled her head backwards and stared at the ceiling. "I want to go

home."

"I know you do, and so do I, but we can't do any of that right now, can we? You've got to get your head back on your shoulders for the here and now, Rose, because we ain't going anywhere. You've got a rather major thing to think about, and you'd better make some decisions soon because it's going to change your life. And your mom's."

Rose breathed another great sigh and covered her face with her hands. "Oh my God, I can't even begin to think of how to tell her this. She's gonna go mad."

"Well, you're not a kid anymore, sweetheart."

"I know, but I'm only nineteen. Or twenty." She puzzled over this for a moment before she cast the thought aside. "Either way, it's far too young to start a family, don't you think?"

"Not judging by some of the girls 'round here."

"They've just got nothing better to do."

"Now Rose."

"I never wanted this, not now!"

"You don't have to go through with it. It was an accident."

She looked up and stared hard at Jack, who was probably being more understanding and helpful than she had thought he would be. And yet his remark hadn't been comforting to her in the slightest.

"It's your life," he reminded her again after a pause. "You call the shots."

She looked at him for a while longer before she felt her eyes well with tears. "I just miss him, Jack," she whispered. "I miss him so much."

Jack leapt off his chair and embraced her. "Hey, easy there," he murmured.

"I wish he was here too."

"I know you do, but we're gonna have to do our best without him, aren't we?"

Jack held her for some time, stroking her back and trying to soothe her, right up until the moment Jackie entered the room with a couple of shopping bags and said, looking between them, "What on earth's going on now?"

Jack pulled away from Rose and then Jackie saw her daughter's tear-streaked face and cried, "Oh Rose! What's the matter, sweetheart? What did the doctor say? Is it bad?"

Jackie dropped her bags and rushed to her daughter's side, crouching before her while Rose tried to collect herself.

Rose found that her mum wasn't really helping matters as she began to fuss over her and rant about all sorts of random concerns. Rose hardly heard what she was saying, in truth, because she was too busy trying to formulate her explanation for the situation, but her mother's constant rambling wasnt helping; she could barely hear herself think! Jack thankfully managed to silence Jackie a few moments later by saying, "Rose, I think your mom needs to know what's up."

Jackie's face, looking between Jack and her daughter now, was so full of horror that Rose felt far worse than she had to begin with. She could barely get her head round it all herself, never mind get her mum to understand.

"Talk to me, Rose," Jackie said, taking her hand.

Rose sniffled once again and wiped her eyes again. "Mum," she said quietly. "I think I might... might be..."

---

"PREGNANT?" Jackie screamed five seconds after her daughter had uttered the taboo word. She paced about the lounge in disbelief, flapping and flustered, and reacting just how Rose had feared she would.

"But after all we've talked about, all the precautions. Didn't you think? Didn't you use protection?"

Jack took a backseat, feeling thoroughly sorry for Rose, and kinda getting the hint that the worst was yet to come.

"Well, I just can't believe it. a daughter of mine being so stupid."

"I wasn't being stupid, mum!" Rose protested.

"You could have fooled me! Getting yourself pregnant at your age. There must be something loose in that head of yours! You should know better. You're too young!"

"I didn't plan this either, you know? It just appened."

"That makes it worse!"

"Oh, does it?"

"You're no better than the other slappers around here --" Jack looked embarrassed to be here now; the whole situation was beginning to feel quite uncomfortable. "--a single mother with no job and no prospects. And do I need to ask who the father is?"

Rose was pretty agitated by now. "Yes mum, that's right - it's the Doctor's, okay?"

"So you were lying to me again when you said your relationship wasn't sexual!"

"No!"

"What's that man done to you, Rose? We used to be honest with each other."

"Nothing's changed. You're just overreacting."

"Overreacting? Rose, you're having a baby!"

Rose sighed and looked away. It still hadn't really hit her, how big this matter was. "It was our last night together, mum. He might even be dead by now--"

"Oh, a fine father he'll make, then, if he's not even going to be here!"

"Neither was dad!" she shouted. "It's not his fault."

"Then whose is it?"

"Let me see - maybe mine as well."

Jackie glowered at her. "Well, I hope it was worth it."

They then just stared at one another, quite worn out.

Jack was going to get up and offer everyone a cup of tea, but Jackie again opened her mouth and cut in first; "An alien." She gasped as the thought suddenly came to her. "My God, he wasn't even human, was he?"

Rose turned away. "That doesn't matter," she whispered.

"It will when the child's born - it could have two heads, or anything."

Rose gave her mum a severe glare at this, and was suddenly reminded, unwittingly, of some of the comments Cassandra, the last human', had made, back on Platform One during her first adventure with the Doctor. She recalled all those snipes the bitchy trampoline had uttered about mongrels, the people who were the products of human and non-human liaisons; crossbreeds like the one she now carried in her womb.

Rose felt suddenly cold as she saw the terrible parallels between that human monstrosity and her mother. Her mum was right, though - she wasn't going to give birth to a pure, human' child; but that didn't matter. Her child would be part of her and part of the Doctor, and nothing could be wrong with that.

"Have you finished insulting the Doctor and my unborn kid, yet?" she hissed with a strange intensity, something that threw both Jackie and the Captain off-guard in an instant.

Jackie looked more than a little distressed. "I just don't want you to ruin your life, sweetheart."

Rose only stared back at her mother with dark eyes. "My life was ruined the moment the Doctor sent me back here. What life?" She then got up and rushed off to her room.

Jackie exchanged glances with Jack as they heard Rose's door slam, but the Captain hardly knew what to do. "It'll be fine," he eventually opted to say.

Jackie didn't say anything in return, however; she just stormed off into the kitchen.

There was then a long, silent pause before Jack, now all alone in the Tyler's lounge, permitted himself to exhale noisily. He was confident that things would calm down in the end; it was in both Rose and Jackie's natures to get easily roused up – a face-off had been inevitable - but it was only because they loved each other, and they would both come around.

And, sure enough, by the end of the day, Rose was in her mother's arms, confused, tearful and uncertain, but at ease. Though the tension was still there between her and her mother, they were at least being civil to one another. After all, Rose needed her mother now more than ever. And Jackie knew it.

**TBC...**


	6. Mickey

**Notes:** More angst. Something will actually happen soon. :) And I hope this feels right - I was a bit apprehensive about writing Mickey, but I thought that I ought to get him involved, too. Wonderfully beta-read by **Kali**, again.

* * *

**Part 6 - Mickey**

Mickey hadn't seen Rose for some time now. He'd been waiting to see the blue box materialise in its usual place in front of the takeaway, down in the courtyard below his flat. He found himself looking out the window almost constantly to see if it might be there… but it never was. As far as he knew, Rose hadn't been back in the here-and-now since the hullabaloo in Cardiff involving that Slitheen, Margaret, and some kind of rift in the earth… and that encounter had hardly ended happily. He hadn't even said goodbye - he just hadn't been able to bring himself to do it, so angry had he felt at Rose for running off back to that blasted Doctor, and leaving him in the lurch…

It was the Doctor on Mickey's mind right now as he walked out onto his small balcony one afternoon and looked down to see none other than Captain Jack, another guy that Rose had been travelling with, strutting down the path as if he did it every day!

Mickey couldn't believe his eyes at first, but there was no mistaking that man's gait and glowing countenance. "Hey, Harkness!" he yelled.

The man immediately stopped and looked about himself until he caught sight of Mickey and gave the other man a wave. He was about to shout a response, but Mickey beat him to it; "Stay there!" he ordered whilst he pulled on his trainers and rushed out of his flat. He tore down the stairs as fast as he could before he burst out into the courtyard and skidded to a halt before the man.

"It is you!" he said, catching his breath. "Jumping-Jack-Flash!"

"Look, who is--?" Jack began, but Mickey interrupted again.

"My God, are you back?" he asked. "How long you bin back? Is Rose here, too? Is she all right?"

Jack held his hands up for silence. "Hey, slow down, Mr. Smith, she's doing okay. I'm surprised she hasn't got in touch."

Mickey's face darkened a little at this."Yeah, well you know how busy she is with the Doctor."

Jack paused for a moment before he said, placing his arm around Mickey's shoulders and urging him to walk with him. "The Doc' ain't here anymore, Mickey."

"What? He just dumped you, then?"

Jack waved a hand at him in denial. "No, not at all. We got into a spot of trouble and he ended up having to ransom us for his time machine. It's not a pretty tale and the prospects weren't good, but he managed to get me and Rose to safety, and…" He paused for a second. "Well, we just don't know what's happened to him now. Or what might yet happen to us."

Mickey didn't really know how to react. "Oh right…" he settled on saying at length. "So, you two are stuck here?"

Jack didn't really like how he'd said that, but it was the truth. "Yeah, looks like it."

"Right… I'll drop by and see Rose later, then."

Jack nodded. "Yeah, she's --"

"She's what?"

Jack was about to continue then decided against what he was going to say. "She's got something to tell you," he said instead.

Mickey frowned a little. "What about?"

"You'll see," he replied with a weak smile. He then patted the lad on the back and said, "Catch ya later, Mickey Smith."

---

Rose's test results had come back a couple of weeks ago, and it was all but confirmed - there was indeed a Baby-Tyler growing in her belly - but she still hadn't quite come to terms with it. She found that she was determined to keep this baby, though. Perhaps this was now her reason to live, to raise the last of the Time Lords. It might be on a council estate in the rougher suburbs of twenty-first century London, but hey, it was something.

She'd been offered regular appointments to see the nurse at the local surgery, and to have the progress of her baby monitored, just like other expectant mothers, but part of her was unsure about this. If her baby was only part human, wouldn't it also show part alien tendencies? Would it have bodily structures unlike a normal human? And, if someone else discovered this, what would happen to her child…?

Rose was currently finding herself on the end of one of her mum's constant streams of gossip. Whilst Jackie's voice floated out to her from the kitchen, she absentmindedly flicked through a copy of _Heat_ magazine and wished she'd turned on the TV rather than give her mum a chance to talk for England…

"You know, Colleen's getting big now," Jackie said. "I won't be surprised if her baby comes early."

Rose sighed and turned the page.

"Don't look likely that the kid'll have a father, though. Man ran off with some buxom blonde from the pub. You remember that barmaid, Kirsty?"

"Kirsty Blake?"

"That's the one."

Rose shrugged to herself, but said no more.

"And I said to her, it's all we get round here, bloody single mums. Said your fella wasn't gonna be here, either."

Rose felt her brow furrow. "You told her? I can't believe you--"

"Well, there's no use hiding it, Rose. You won't be able to in a few weeks."

"Well at least I know my fella didn't run off with a buxom blonde."

"How do you know that? All that travelling through time – he could have loads of you on the go."

Rose turned the next page too forcefully and tore it. "That just shows that you don't know him at all, mum. He's not like that."

"Oh, but he made an exception for you, did he?"

"Leave him alone."

"I'll leave him alone as soon as he shows his face again."

"No you won't, you'll kill 'im."

"Yes, well, after that…"

Rose chucked the magazine aside and was about to take the dispute to the next level when there was a knock at the door.

"Oh, that bloody Jack… he might as well live here," Jackie moaned as she walked out of the kitchen and went to open the door.

Rose knew that it wasn't Jack by the fact that her mother didn't say anything for a moment, and when she did finally speak, she only said, "Oh, it's you. Well, come in, then. She's in the

lounge."

Rose angled her head about and felt suddenly nervous as she saw Mickey walk through the door.

"Hi," she said, sitting up a little straighter.

Mickey gave her a faint smile before he scratched the back of his neck and resolved to sit in the armchair opposite her. "I saw that American friend of yours," he explained. "He told me you were back and all."

Rose smiled half-heartedly and nodded. "Yeah. Here I am. Home again."

Mickey looked her up and down. "You don't seem too happy 'bout it."

Rose shook her head, looking away. "I'm not."

"Why didn't you come and see me?"

She looked back at him and ran her tongue over her lips. "I'm sorry, Mickey, things are just really difficult right now."

"Yeah, heard your Doctor took off."

Rose's countenance darkened. "No, he didn't, he sent me and Jack back 'ere to save us."

"Same thing."

"Yeah right. You weren't even there so don't pretend you know better."

Mickey shook his head and waved a hand at her dismissively. "You're obsessed, that's what you are, Rose. And what is it you've gotta tell me, anyway?"

"Tell you?"

The phone suddenly began to ring and Jackie shot the room to answer it. "Keep your voices down, you two," she said as she picked up the phone and held it to her ear. "Hello? Beth! Yes, it's true. Well you ought to have seen my face when she told me! Fuming, I was, absolutely fuming…"

Rose kneaded her forehead and Mickey stared at Jackie until she walked off toward her bedroom, voice ringing out behind her. "She's a fool, I told her. But do you think she listens?" Then she shut the door behind her.

"Well?" Mickey went on. "What's up? Captain Cheesy said you had sommat to tell me."

Rose ignored his jibe. "Wot about?"

"'Bout you."

Rose wanted to kill Jack all of a sudden. "You're gonna go ballistic…"

"Oh, it's to do with the Doctor, isn't it?"

"Yes it is, Mickey. And just you remember Tricia Delaney before you say anything."

"Me and Tricia aren't anything anymore."

"Yeah, well, just remember that you had been, and that we" –she gestured between herself and Mickey - "haven't, all right?"

"All right!"

Rose sighed and stared at him. She felt sorry for Mickey; she'd really treated him badly, but she couldn't be here for him anymore. The fact was, she didn't want to be here, and her heart had long ago been taken by someone else, whether she had acknowledged it or not. "I'm having a baby," she said.

Mickey stared at her for a while before he laughed. "No, tell me the truth."

She stared at him, dumbfounded. "It's not a lie - why would I lie about something like this?"

Mickey's smile faded and he shook his head. "No way. I know you. You're not that stupid…"

Rose felt herself flush a little and she turned away once more, really wishing she had the TV on now just to give her something else to look at. "I didn't plan it, it just… happened."

"Oh right, so there was some hanky-panky going on it that time machine, eh?"

"It's not like that."

"Why didn't you just be honest with me, Rose? Why didn't you just tell me that you didn't want me anymore?"

"I… It just happened, Mickey."

"Did it? Well I'm so glad I waited for you."

Rose sighed heavily and tried to think of something to say that wouldn't dig her into a deeper hole. "I'm sorry. I guess I didn't realise how much I liked him, until the end."

"Don't give me that. You knew well enough."

"Don't think I've done this on purpose!"

"I bet this is why he's dumped you, eh? Had his fun then toddled off coz he don't want a kid in that little world of his. He's left you, Rose, just admit it."

"He doesn't even know!" She got to her feet and Mickey did, too, before she opted to end this interview. "Look, just get out," she snapped, pointing at the door. "You're never going to understand."

"No, you're right," he rejoined, "I'm too stupid, aren't I?"

"Stop it! It's not fair!"

"You'd rather be with more intelligent beings now, wouldn't you Rose?" he continued, regardless.

She then physically pushed him towards the front door before he could say any more, quickly pulling back on the handle and shoving him through the doorway once they got there.

Mickey then got the door slammed in his face.

---

Jack caught Mickey at the entrance to the stairwell and could see the young man hadn't taken the news well, having had a dose of the typical Tyler temper on top of that. Before Mickey could slip passed him, though, he hooked his arm round his shoulders and turned him back the way they had come. "Knew this would happen," he said.

Mickey tried to get free. "Let go!"

"Look, Mr. Smith, she needs friends right now. Don't be like this."

"Friends don't treat each other like she's treated me. She's got too big for her boots. She thinks she's better than us 'normal people' now."

"No she doesn't."

"Easy for you to say."

Jack looked hard at Mickey and lifted his arm from his shoulders, whilst Mickey took a breath and, deflating a little, looked back at the Captain wretchedly. "It's all just too much. It hurts."

"It will hurt - it always does - but if you really care for her, then you won't lose her friendship, will you?"

Mickey looked down and exhaled. "I need some time to think."

"No problem. So does Rose. We all do." He nodded at him. "Catch ya later."

Mickey watched Jack return to the stairwell and take the next flight of steps up to his flat, before, with one final glance back toward Rose's front door, he too went on his way.

**TBC…**


	7. Loopholes

**Notes:** I'm trying to keep things comprehensible. This chapter wasn't originally going to happen, but I figured I needed to keep up with the Doctor rather than leave his side of the story a vague mystery. And I'm sure they'll be plot holes or time laws I've ignored in here, but let's just overlook them, shall we? ;)

Thanks to **Cait **and **Allendre** for beta-reading this for me.

* * *

**Part 7 - Loopholes**

"The Time Lords were indeed intelligent," said a Dalek as it studied the control panels of the TARDIS.

"Yes," another added, "But this technology will take a substantial amount of time to transfer to our fleet."

"The Emperor's will must be done," a third interjected. "We must salvage the technology for our own. There is no question."

Out of the six Daleks currently in the TARDIS's control room, this third one was the ringleader. It had a haughty and arrogant air about it, which was some accomplishment for a giant pepper-pot, and it thus had the honour of being the one the Doctor hated the most.

The Doctor himself was currently being flanked by two of the six Daleks, both of which were keeping a good eye on him, whilst the other four were busy studying the myriad of switches, levers and screens at the chamber's centre. The clouds of a storm were brewing in the pits of his eyes as he watched this quartet at work, for he wanted nothing more than to get them all out of his precious sanctuary.

"Begin replication of TARDIS technology," the lead Dalek now ordered.

The leading Dalek's three other lackeys took up their positions around the control panels and plugged themselves in. Their sharp minds then began to absorb what information they could from the time machine whilst the Doctor could do nothing but stand there and watch, powerless to do anything.

He inhaled a deep breath and tried to remain calm. He knew better than to act brashly, however much he wanted to; it was sheer fortune (or rather misfortune) that was keeping him alive right now, the plain fact that the Daleks grudgingly needed him until they had mastered his machine and its technology. He was still hoping that he would be able to turn this dire situation to his advantage, as well, something which he could only accomplish by keeping his cool. He knew that there was still a slight possibility that he might be able to prevent the Daleks from getting away with the knowledge of time travel, and he prayed that he could turn this possibility into a certainty.

He looked over once more at the quartet of Daleks surrounding the central column of the TARDIS and pondered on things. The Dalek Emperor was still revelling in his great triumph of having acquired a Time Lord's TARDIS, and he was eager to put its abilities to use, but there were already obstacles lining his path.

For one, he was presently relying on the Doctor in order to be able to use the time machine at all; this was a dilemma that certainly had to be rectified for the Time Lords were their mortal enemies and had to be eliminated. It was an insult to think they had to depend on one of them to do greater things.

Another drawback was the fact that his fellow Daleks had to actually go _inside _the TARDIS to use its time travelling capabilities, which was hardly practical - the Emperor wanted to take his entire fleet back in time, not just a select few soldiers, and this was why the technology needed to be duplicated and reproduced in every single Dalek ship.

The Doctor felt a grim smile lurch up at the corners of his mouth. Time travel was a complex art, an art that his race had perfected and even been named after, but the Daleks were different - they were engineered to kill, not to journey through the many dimensions of time and space.

The Doctor's last journey through time, where he had returned Rose and Jack to the twenty-first century, had in fact proved their lack of suitability for such travel to a certain extent. The Doctor had been escorted on his journey to and from the year 2006, the Daleks acting as an armed escort to make sure the Doctor kept his word, but upon their return, some of the Daleks had been disorientated, whilst others has been slow to react to stimuli, as if the very nature of time travel had had an adverse effect on them. It was clear that they were not as flexible a species as the Time Lords, not even as flexible as humanity, if they were affected so.

In retrospect, the Doctor wondered if perhaps all would not be lost even if the Daleks _did_ gather his time-travelling technology. They were not built to evolve and adapt to such things, after all - they were a genetically manufactured order, a race made to be the same forever, nothing but an army of killing machines; evolution did not suit them. The Doctor only had to remember that lone soldier, imprisoned deep beneath the Utah desert, who had succumbed to Rose's DNA and thus begun mutating, to realise this.

"It took my people centuries to perfect the technology of time travel," he consequently opted to say to his audience, looking particularly at the ringleader. "Don't think you'll master it in a day. You can copy it, but I'll wager you won't understand it. Or be able to cope with it."

The leader seemed to give him something of a long, hard stare. "We are geniuses," he rejoined, as if it were obvious. "We were engineered to be the greatest. Do not think the workings of the Time Lords are beyond us. We will soon understand what the primitive minds of your ancestors concocted."

The Doctor glared at him. "Maybe. But were you bred to travel in time?"

The Dalek said nothing.

The Doctor flashed him another grim grin. "It doesn't suit all races, you know."

"There is nothing my race cannot achieve," the Dalek replied.

The Doctor gave him another fierce look, but said no more. The Dalek was probably right, after all, but he had to hope that they would encounter serious problems when it came to transporting themselves through time, and that this would either stop them altogether, or at least slow down their progress. After all, the Utah-Dalek he and Rose had encountered had hardly been in the best of shape after its tumble through time…

He cast these bleak thoughts aside for a brief moment and looked up into the rafters of the TARDIS, his blessed machine and friend. 'Come on, old girl,' he urged her, 'You got us into this mess. You've got to get us out.'

Telepathic though she was, the TARDIS didn't seem to respond.

The Doctor only continued to stare at the column central to the chamber, as if he were staring his machine in the eyes, and willed her to do something. He knew that she couldn't give up, not on him, or herself; she was alive, and she had to remind the Daleks of that, too.

The living energy of the TARDIS was one thing the Doctor knew the Daleks might never be able to get their heads round, something they might even abhor, and it would be fitting for that element to thus be their downfall.

'Even if we both have to die,' the Doctor continued to tell her, 'Then at least the world will be safe. Don't let them do this.'

"Last of the Time Lords," the lead Dalek suddenly proclaimed as he turned his eyestalk onto the Doctor. "Ironic that he who is the last of his race should now give us the key to the destruction of all inferior life."

The Doctor's gaze tightened another time on this malicious creature, but he didn't open his mouth.

Then suddenly a screen on the TARDIS' control panel came to life and words blinked across the screen. The Doctor felt his brow furrow - what was this? Had the TARDIS heard him? Was she going to help…?

"What is this?" one of Daleks said as it unplugged itself from the console and turned its eye down to look at the screen.

"The machine seems to have identified another," the leader said as it rolled up behind its comrade and read the readout in turn.

"Impossible," one of the others said as it too parted from its terminal. "They all died in the war, slaughtering our brethren. All of them but one."

The Doctor looked between the throng of conferring Daleks before he then became the subject of their gazes as they all turned their sights onto him in the same instant.

"The Time Lords are dead," one of them said to him.

"I know," the Doctor growled. "Do you think you need to remind me?"

"They were wiped out."

"Yes, they were! Happy?"

The lead Dalek had an air of suspicion about him now, something which made the whole chamber feel cold and unsettling. "Then explain this. Another has been detected through time."

The Doctor was overcome with a strange sense of confusion, followed by a tiny inkling of hope. "Another?" he whispered.

"The Time Lords are our enemies," one of the other Daleks crowed. "They must all be destroyed!"

"But they died, I know they did!" the Doctor blustered.

"We will soon have their technology," the leader calmly went on. "They will not escape us for long. Time will soon be no object."

"This one must still be destroyed!" another protested. "They both must die, the Doctor and the newcomer. We cannot coexist with any Time Lords."

The leader turned his eyestalk on this Dalek. "We must discuss this with the Emperor. All decisions must be made by the Almighty."

The Doctor wasn't listening to them any more - he was just staring into the middle distance and wondering what the TARDIS was playing at. Surely there were no more Time Lords? He knew there weren't; he had been the last for far too long to be able to doubt his race's extinction in the Time War. But then, what was the TARDIS on about? What signal had she detected? What had she _really _found?

"What are you doing, old girl?" he murmured aloud until, catching him by surprise, one of the Daleks suddenly began screeching!

The Doctor looked up to see white bolts of electricity surging up the arm of this shrieking Dalek, emitting from where it was still plugged into the TARDIS's consoles. "Help me!" it screamed, whilst its comrades came to attention and rushed to its side.

But it was too late. With a final bang, the Dalek's head exploded and a column of smoke rose into the air.

The Doctor couldn't help but smile at this - the TARDIS was suddenly pulling out all the stops!

The Daleks looked at one another, caught unawares, and pondered on what to do next. That was until, leaping up through the trellised floor, another bolt of electricity caught a second Dalek by surprise!

In the ensuing confusion, the Doctor tore away from his pair of Dalek jailers and looked around himself - 'Assets, assets!' he thought, but he could see nothing… except Jack's big gun, the one which the Captain had picked up on the Games Station. His eyes lingered on it and he tried to push the memories it brought to light out of his head…

_/'Rose, get out of the way, now!'_

'_No, coz I won't let you do this.'_

'_That thing killed hundreds of people!'_

'_It's not the one pointing the gun at me.'/_

'No' said his conscience. 'Never a gun.' But what else was there?

"The Doctor is attempting hostile action! Exterminate him!"

He turned to see the remaining few unscathed Daleks, roused and angry, gliding over the metal floor toward him.

'Think!' he kept urging himself. 'Think, damn you!'

And then it came to him as the image of Rose, telling him not to kill the Dalek back in Utah, loitered before his mind's eye. A chain of thought flickered through his brain, filing down from Rose until it hit a conclusion, and he laughed. "Of course!" he shouted, drawing his sonic screwdriver from out of his pocket and aiming it at the control panel.

There was a flicker of light and a holographic image of the Doctor appeared on the floor, in-between the two Daleks that had been his guard. They turned to look at it, stunned, whilst it began to say "This is emergency program one…"

"Exterminate!" was the initial reaction of the two as they glared at the ghost-Doctor, and they shot at the image without thinking. Their death rays consequently passed through the hologram and hit one another. They both screamed and erupted into flames.

There now remained only two of the original six Daleks, the leader and one of its associates; the Doctor could just make out the silhouettes of the pair through the smoke that now fogged the entire chamber, rising up from the metal shells of the deceased Daleks.

The leader stared back through the smog impassively. "It is a trap," he plainly stated.

"But we have not yet downloaded all that we need!" the other objected.

"We have enough," the leader countered. "Take evasive action."

The Doctor was surprised at this Dalek for making such a decision, and he watched it as it shepherded its comrade out of the TARDIS and back into the safety of their own flagship. Perhaps he had at last met one of the wisest of the Daleks…

As soon as the pair had trundled away, though, the Doctor didn't leave it another second before he threw himself at the controls of the TARDIS and yanked down a lever. The machine groaned and vibrated and was soon sailing once again through the eddies of time and space.

"You could have done all that sooner," the Doctor then grumbled at the TARDIS as he shut off his holographic twin, who was talking to an absent Rose, and gave the ship a pat on the console. "I swear you sometimes have ulterior motives… What was the point, eh? Leaving me dancing on the edge of a knife like that…"

The TARDIS, naturally, didn't respond, but she somehow managed to have a smug air about her.

It took the Doctor a while to collect himself after all this excitement, and it was then that he realised, with a heavy heart, that he might just have left the earth and everyone back on the Games Station to die; but there were now, unbelievably, more pressing issues at hand...

He pushed the smouldering shells of the four dead Daleks out of his way as he walked round the control room and again looked up at the TARDIS's column. "How much did they get away with?" he asked her with dread, flicking a few switches and turning several knobs.

Words flickered across one of the screens and the Doctor heaved a deep sigh, hanging his head. "Too much…" he murmured. "They _are _geniuses - it won't take them forever to establish the basic laws and means of time travel."

He mulled on this for a while longer before he then asked, "And what of this 'Time Lord' you told them about? What are you playing at?"

He turned another couple of knobs before more readings came onto the screen.

"It wasn't a ruse?" he gasped, rubbing his chin and staring at the report. "Are you sure?"

Another few taps on the keyboard and the TARDIS gave him an affirmative - it was no lie.

The Doctor shook his head. He could feel it deep inside, that something was amiss and very wrong; there was an anomaly in time and space which hadn't been there before, and it reeked of Dalek.

"So what now?" he pondered aloud, "The Daleks know of me and this other 'Time Lord' and will soon be on our tails. And history _will_ change wherever they decide to intercede, there's no doubt. We must stop them. Going back to 200,100 is hardly going to help anymore… All creation is again at stake."

He flicked a few more switches and examined the great universal time line, searching for a glitch somewhere, a reading that indicated when and where the Daleks would soon decide to appear in time and space. It didn't take long for the TARDIS to discover this.

"Back to earth?" the Doctor said. "That figures… Can't seem to shake that planet. It's not Cardiff, is it…?"

He read down the lines of text the TARDIS was throwing up. "Right. So, they take 'X' amount of time to imitate your technology, fine, then what do they get up to…?" He tapped his lips with his fingers. "Of course, they'll be searching for this other Time Lord - and they'll also be searching for me. They want us dead. And yet…" He paused again before he continued. "It feels like they want _more_ from us. I can't explain that. A gut reaction… or maybe just something I ate."

He studied the reports for a little longer before he rushed round the control room and flicked several more switches. "Right, ol' girl, we've got a Time Lord and a world to save. And then we've gotta find Rose and Jack. Let's prevent that glitch from appearing in time, and make sure we're home in time for tea."

What the Doctor failed to notice, as the TARDIS hurtled on through time and space, was that the screen on the console said, "Bad Wolf."

**TBC…**


	8. Two Hearts

**Author's Notes:** Sorry for the delay! Life is just too full of ups-and-downs, accidents at work, and the Crufts dog show, and what have you, so this part comes to you un-beta-read for quickness. If there are any major errors, point them out to me and I'll fix them up ASAP. Speaking as someone who's never had a baby, too, I'm doing my best to write this convincingly. I've done a bit of reading and all, but I don't want to get too wound up in writing a realistic pregnancy and birth - it's just a story, after all, and I don't want it to takeover the story.

My apologies again - I love this story too much to abandon it, so don't think I ever will! You're all welcome to email me with well-meaning-kicks-up-the-ass, you know. ;) Heh.

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**Part 8 - Two Hearts**

Rose opened her eyes and squinted in the bright light, but it proved to be so intense that she could do nothing but turn away. This momentarily distracted her from the pain in her groin, a pain that seemed to have penetrated the whole of her body, leaving her limbs shaking and her breathing erratic. Her mind was drawing a blank, however, as if she had just lost a substantial amount of her memory, for she had no idea where she was, or what was happening.

And then her thoughts hit home - the baby!

She braved the bright light and opened her eyes again, trying to focus on her surroundings so that she could ascertain where she was. She discovered at length that she was laid down in some kind of operating theatre, and, as her desperate hands searched her body, she also realised, to her horror, that her child was no longer a part of her. Her tummy was still a little rounded, but the life that had been contained therein was now gone.

Her breaths quickened once more and she looked about for any sign of someone so that she could find an explanation for this. At last her eyes set upon a pair of white-frocked surgeons, who were stood over the far side of the room. Their bodies were huddled together and they were talking excitedly about something, and pointing at a hidden article held between them. Rose could not even catch a glimpse of this mystery thing, though, for the doctors were stood far too close together.

She thus opened her mouth to call to them… but nothing came out. Her throat felt tight and dry, and she could force no words out. Her imposed silence meant that she could hear the ensuing exchange between the two surgeons quite clearly, however.

"It's quite a miracle," one of them said.

"Yes, quite," the other replied. "Two hearts."

Rose felt her brow furrow: two hearts? But before she could hear any more, her mum and Jack were suddenly at her bedside, one to the left and the other to the right. This might have brought some kind of comfort to Rose had the pair not been wearing the most ridiculously false smiles.

"Well done, Rose," Jack said, in a way that an adult might talk to a five year old. "You've done very well."

Rose's frown deepened and she turned next to her mum, who nodded in turn and said, "Yes, sweetheart. That child will make us all so rich."

"An anomaly," Jack added.

"An alien," Jackie went on.

"They've never seen anything like it!"

"Debbie knows a bloke on _The Mirror_, give you a grand for an interview!"

"Exclusive photos."

"A biography deal."

Rose's eyes bounced between the two as they each bantered in turn, and it began to drive her mad. "Where's my baby?" she finally managed to ask, her voice breaking free from its bonds of silence.

"Don't worry," Jack said, still in that unnatural and condescending way.

"It's in good hands," Jackie concurred.

"The doctors are keeping It."

"They want to examine It further."

This was just too much for Rose to handle, and before they could say any more, she shot up into a sitting position and then watched as the two doctors turned to face her, one of them cradling her child in their arms. But it was no ordinary baby. It looked more like a -

"Wolf," Rose whispered.

And then she woke up.

Breathing deeply, she found herself sat up in her own bed, in her own bedroom, with her growing child still nestled safely inside her body. She ran her hands over her stomach before she convinced herself that she was back in that place called reality and that it had all been a bizarre and terrible dream.

The bedside clock read 4:32am. It was still dark outside and, for once, very quiet. It was also the day that Rose was due to go and have her first scan at the doctors' surgery and she was more nervous than ever about it. The dream hadn't helped calm her nerves in the slightest.

After she had pondered for a while on the nightmare, as well as on the prospects of the day ahead, Rose decided to try and get some more sleep. She slowly slid back beneath the covers of her bed, burying her head in her pillow, and muttered to herself, "Bad Wolf. That stupid bad wolf…"

---

"Look, Rose, look at this!"

It was now eleven o' clock in the morning and Rose and Jack were sat side-by-side in the waiting room of the local surgery.

Rose cast her eyes down the page of a catalogue that Jack had shoved in her face, cringing at the image before her whilst Jack continued, "Isn't it adorable?"

His voice was bubbling with enthusiasm, and as much as she appreciated his support, Rose knew that she and Jack were never quite on the same wavelength when it came to dressing children. She just smiled and pushed the magazine back toward him. "I am _not _dressing my kid in a _Winnie the Pooh_ dress suit, Jack."

"But it's so cute! Look at the ears on the hood!"

"I'm having a baby, not a bear cub!" she chuckled. ('Or a wolf cub', her mind added, but she quickly pushed that thought aside.)

Jack, oblivious to her recent dream and her thoughts, just shrugged and gave her a gentle 'have it your way' look. "Fine. You can't say no if I buy Junior one, though."

"I certainly can!" she assured him.

The two laughed a little and fell back into a contented silence.

Rose could feel her heart pounding harder and harder as the minutes went by, each passing one bringing her encounter with the dreaded scan even closer. She couldn't help but see the events of her dream from last night playing over and over before her eyes, like some kind of bad omen for the future. It made the wait feel even more unbearable.

It wasn't just that, either, it was the fact that, in contrast, time generally seemed to be flying by very quickly. Each passing day brought the birth of her unplanned-for child ever the closer, and still there was no sign of the Doctor. This scared Rose perhaps more than anything else. She had to hope that he would turn up, and that he was safe. The alternatives just didn't bear thinking about.

Jack flicked through more pages of the catalogue he'd picked up off the magazine rack, having quite some fun browsing the baby sections and looking at possible purchases for what he saw as being his future niece or nephew. "Do you think it'll be a boy or a girl?" he mused.

Rose shook her head. "How should I know?"

"You're the one carrying the little bundle. Maternal instincts and all."

Rose scoffed. "My mum honestly thought I was going to be a boy when she was having me, I kicked so much. Who can tell?"

"Don't you want to know?"

"No. Wouldn't that take away all the fun?"

"Fun? You won't be saying that when you're in labour."

"Damn right. But I want there to be the surprise at the end, the 'is it a boy or a girl?' moment."

"Not a bad point," Jack conceded.

The Captain continued flicking and Rose emitted a shaky sigh. "Jack, I'm scared," she finally confessed.

"A lot of women are for their first, aren't they?"

Rose looked at him, knowing he'd missed the point. "No, I mean I'm scared about what they might find."

"They'll find a _baby_, Rose. Don't fret."

"But the Doctor -"

"Wasn't human," Jack conceded in a low tone, so as not to attract unwanted attention, "I know. But, c'mon, you would have thought he was, wouldn't you? Bet you didn't think he was alien when you met him?"

"Well, no… Not to look at, anyway."

"Then what's to worry about?"

Rose sighed and shrugged. "I dunno."

"Exactly." Jack shut his magazine and chucked it casually onto the nearest table, much to the disapproval of a couple of elderly women sat on its opposite side. "So, chill out and think positive. You don't want your negative aura rubbing off on Junior."

Rose felt her stony face slip into a silly smile. "Stop calling him or her 'Junior'! It's sounds so American."

"Does it?"

"Yeah."

Jack smirked and shrugged and then caught the ever-more disapproving eyes of the elderly women. He threw them a wink. "Morning, ladies. You're looking very fine today."

Thankfully, Rose heard her name called, so she pulled Jack away from the now savage glares of the two old dears and took him along by the elbow to accompany her.

---

The jelly made Rose giggle as the midwife spread it on her stomach, and her whole body seemed to go on red alert, skin tingling everywhere from the slightest touch.

The midwife was an amiable young woman who talked Rose through procedure as she went along, telling her how the ultrasound worked, and before Rose even knew it, there was an ultrasound image of the inside of her womb on the screen. Jack sat beside her quietly, equally spellbound.

She watched in awe as the midwife pointed out the features of the tiny foetus, its head and its tiny arms and legs.

"And this," she said, "Is the… Oh."

Rose's stomach felt like it flipped and she gave Jack a frightened glance. "What?" she asked.

The midwife pointed, "Well, here's your baby's heart, and there," and she moved her finger a little, "is another."

Rose paled but the midwife didn't seem to be at all dismayed. "I believe you're having twins."

Rose frowned. "Twins?"

The midwife nodded and gave her a congratulatory smile, "Yes. We occasionally see cases like this, where one foetus masks the other. It's nothing to be worried about."

Rose looked again at the scan but felt that it was certainly something to worry about.

**TBC…**


	9. The Last Hurdle

**Notes: **Sorry for the dealy again -I shall be moving away from my job, my house, and my city within the next couple of weeks or so, so please be prepared for more unregular updating. :) Thanks for everyone's support so far, though - it's really nice to know that so many people are enjoying this little tale of mine.

* * *

**Part 9 - The Last Hurdle**

Jack was struggling to keep up with Rose as they made their way back from the surgery. She was obviously quite upset by something and was marching on ahead like there was no tomorrow.

"Rose, relax!" he implored.

"Two hearts, Jack!" she called back to him, her arms flying round her in tumult, "She said there were _two_!"

Jack charged to her side. "Well, of course she did."

Rose wasn't really listening, though, so continued to walk on frantically ahead. "I know it's not twins. I just know."

Jack took a deep breath, feeling sure that he didn't deserve to be on the receiving end of all this. "Rose, the Doctor _had _two hearts," he stated as clearly and plainly as he could.

Rose then finally slowed to a halt as Jack's words registered, before she turned on him and gave him a long, lingering look. "What?" she asked.

He gave her a faint smile and put his hand round her shoulder. "Chill," he said, encouraging her to walk slowly by his side. "It's nothing to be afraid of."

"Two hearts?"

"Yeah."

Rose had the perplexed look on her face, the one she used when she was unable to quite get her head around the situation. "Then why didn't he tell me?"

Jack shrugged. "It probably never crossed his mind. It's not the first thing he'd thought of working into a conversation. Just like you'd never think of saying, 'By the way, Doc', I have two kidneys'."

"But that's obvious."

"Is it?"

Rose thought on it for a moment before she conceded to the argument with a sigh. Jack was right, after all.

Jack had expected rose's face to clear and for her to lighten up about the while thing now, but she didn't - he could see it in her face, a real uneasiness and insecurity. "Will you bring me up to speed, Rose?" he asked, "because I think you're hiding something."

She ran her fingers through her hair and took several deep breaths. The fact of the matter was that the midwife's assessment had been too much of a coincidence for her. The two hearts from her scan seemed to have been pulled straight from out her nightmare with the wolf-baby.

"Rose," Jack pressed as the silence lingered. "What is it?"

"I had a dream last night," she confessed at length, looking him straight in the eyes. "A bad one."

He nodded.

"My baby was taken away from me, and they said… these doctors said it had two hearts." She shook her head and bit her lip. "It can't be a coincidence…"

Jack shrugged, offering her a cheery smile. "It was just a dream."

But Rose wasn't so optimistic. "Since so many things have happened to me, with aliens and time travel and all, I don't know what to believe anymore… It just feels wrong."

Jack sighed and put his hand round her shoulders again. "But what's to worry about? If the Doc' had two hearts, it's only natural that the kid should have two as well."

"But it's not natural for a human, that's the point! I'm not going back and risking them taking away my baby. It won't take them long to realise that there's only one baby to those two hearts, and that half of its blood isn't human."

Jack sighed and dropped his arm from her shoulders. "But you need these checkups. They're there to help you, and to make sure everything's okay."

"But things aren't okay! If they discover --"

"It might not be so bad."

Rose gave him a dark look. "You're very naïve for a human," she said.

He shrugged again. "Someone has to be a little less than cynical, or we'd all be paranoid and miserable like you."

She gave him a friendly slap. "It's not funny, you know."

"I'm just trying to keep you afloat!" he smirked. "You can't blame me for trying."

They both walked on for a while in silence until Rose murmured, "What would the Doctor do?"

Jack chuckled under his breath. "Now I don't think we want to get inside his head. He'd probably just postpone all talk of the matter, like he does, and offer everyone a jelly baby."

They both laughed. "Yeah," Rose concurred, "You're probably right."

---

And so, despite Jack's remonstrations, Rose forwent her visits to the midwife for the next few months and left her child's progression to nature. (Funnily enough, jelly babies were one of her cravings. 'Only the Doctor's child' she thought.)

Jack roped his flatmate, the elusive Eugene, into Rose's countdown-to-motherhood, and the pair put their funds together to buy Rose's future son or daughter some toys, blankets and clothes (thankfully the _Winnie the Pooh_ dress-suit never reared its head). Even Jackie became more and more excited as the weeks passed, and was constantly telling the neighbours about how Rose was getting on. Everyone was somehow managing to see some good in the situation, and, though it felt odd, Rose was grateful for it.

Her whole wardrobe was soon made redundant as the bulge began to make its presence felt, and baggy jumpers and stretchy trousers became the norm. Her feet also fell victim to the extra weight, and she found herself spending more time sitting down than standing up. (The times when she'd been able to run about after the Doctor seemed long gone...) Her days were spent rather uneventfully as she felt unable to do more and more, her alien child seeming to drain her of her reserves, and this meant that, as she found herself homebound, she had the daytime TV schedule memorised by week thirty-two.

As the final weeks began to set in, she prayed that the baby would decide to make a move soon. She could only describe the whole nine-month-ordeal as some kind of marathon, which you started with enthusiasm, had a few little difficulties in the middle, then really began to flag toward the end, praying for the finish line to come into sight. Besides the suffering on her part, she just really wanted to see her baby's little face and see how much of her Doctor she could discern in him or her.

The baby decided to stay put right up until Rose's pregnancy had reached its full term (taking advantage of her hospitality, Rose guessed), which then left her with that last, painful hurdle to clear - the birth. And it wasn't called labour for nothing.

Rose knew when it was time, without a doubt - her instincts just seemed to tell her that the twinges of pain she were feeling signalled the beginning of her child's delivery, and that it was no false alarm. It started off okay, but she was glad that she wasn't alone, because this was her first time and she was terrified. Both her mum and Jack were there to keep her company, and Jack made her walk a few times about the flat before they took up residence in the bathroom when the pain of her contractions got too much.

It truly felt to Rose like her body was going to split into two. It wasn't simply pain, either, it was a sensation she could not even begin to describe, of something very alien trying to force itself out her womb. Which wasn't wholly unexpected, really, since her child was not exactly human…

"Now this is the price you pay for your night of passion," Jack joked as he made her comfortable, laying a few towels down for her. "You'll be hating the Doctor by the end of this."

Rose gave him a smile in return before the pain became too much to ignore and her real struggle began.

Jackie could barely allow herself to watch her daughter suffer, though. As the hours passed and Rose remained sat on the bathroom floor, being rocked in Jack's arms, her skin pale and sweaty and her entire body quivering with pain, Jackie could only flitter about in emotional agony and wonder what on earth she could do to help. "Oh, sweetheart," she sighed at one point, wiping her tearful eyes and kneeling by Rose's side, "Let me call a doctor or a midwife, please."

Rose cringed as another great wave of pain thundered through her body, and she felt Jack grip her harder in an attempt quell it. "I want _my _Doctor," she replied ruggedly, lying her head against Jack's shoulder, "Him, or no one."

"But he's not here, is he, darling?"

Rose cried out again as she felt another sharp pain in her groin, but she said nothing else to her mother.

Jackie persisted regardless. "Rose, you need help!" she said.

"No!" Rose insisted, gripping Jack's hand hard as she tried to withstand the agony with her typical bravado. "You know we can't, mum. You know." She lost her voice to a combination of tears and pain, and Jack patted her on the back whilst Jackie was forced to watch her only daughter endure so much agony.

And then Rose _really_ screamed. Jack felt her body convulse and he lowered her gently back onto the floor whilst she clutched her swollen belly. "Easy there, Rose," he whispered, stroking her pallid, damp face with his hand.

"Jack, please!" Jackie continued, putting her hand over his and imploring for him to see things her way. "We're not experts at this. We need someone who knows what they're doing!"

Jack looked back at her with understanding, yet he couldn't do what she wanted him to. "Jackie, I can't. It's her decision, not mine."

"But she's not just in pain! Look at her!"

"I know, but you've got to remember she's carrying a child that's only part human. Her body's been trying to comprehend why it's come across alien genes for the past nine months, and it's still trying to figure out how to cooperate with them now, how to make and to feed them. It's difficult for Rose - it has been since the start - but she can get through this, she can win this fight, because she's a fighter. And her kid will be, too."

Jackie massaged her temples and tried not to cry. "But will she be all right?"

Jack gave her a positive grin. "She'll be fine. Don't worry, grandma."

Jackie smiled a little at him then slapped him lightly on the shoulder. "Don't call me that. It makes me feel so old."

He smirked again and returned his attention to Rose.

Her labour went on to last much of the ensuing night and since Jack seemed to seriously know what he was doing, Jackie could only come and go and offer up moral support. She brought Jack all the towels he asked for, and filled as many buckets with water as he requested, but otherwise, she was quite redundant. If Jack was anything to go by, though, she quite liked the sound of these fifty-first century men.

The darkness lingered on for hours until the sun finally began to rise, and at 7am exactly, a baby cried.

Jackie woke from her stupor in the lounge as that sound hit her ears, a sound she hadn't heard in her own home for a long time. She heaved herself onto her feet and returned to the bathroom to see, amongst the towels, bloody buckets, and creased sheets, her daughter with a little girl all of her own.

"Hey grandma!" Jack said, catching sight of Jackie in the doorway as he sat there by Rose's side, "Congrats! You've officially got a granddaughter."

Jackie was far too relieved and overcome to take offence at the Captain right now. "Oh Rose," she whispered as she lowered herself by her daughter's other side and looked at the pretty little girl.

Rose just sat there cradling her tiny daughter in her arms, exhausted but content, and quite unable to take her eyes off her. "She's so beautiful," she sighed, wiping her tired eyes with the back of her hand and kissing the baby on the forehead.

Jackie kissed Rose's forehead in turn and looked into the child's bright blue eyes. "She's gorgeous," she said, "Just like you were when you were a baby. Oh, your father would love to be here now…"

And Rose knew that he would; but that only reminded her of who else should be here right now as well. "I wish he was here," she whispered.

And then Jackie was off: she began rambling straight away about phoning her mother, about buying all the baby's things (in girly pink), and of how much prettier her grandchild was than Colleen's baby, Rachel.

Jack couldn't help but look on sadly at Rose, however, as Jackie jabbered away; Rose had fought so hard to bring this baby into the world, a child who was neither entirely of the human race or of that of the Time Lords, a girl that, though outwardly human, was in fact a hybrid species - and the father was all but absent. It was a bittersweet experience.

The thought that neither he nor Rose had voiced though, and which they refused to speak of, was the possibility that the father might even be dead. They dared not think of such a possibility.

"She's a little beauty, Rose," he said at last. "What you gonna call her?"

Rose looked deeply into her daughter's blue eyes, exact replicas of her father's, and said, "I don't know. I'm trying to think what he'd have liked--" She paused and quickly corrected herself. "What he _will_ like, I mean."

Jack put his hand round her shoulder. "Well, knowing him, he'd just call it 'The Baby'."

Rose laughed a little. "The Doctor and the Baby… Of course."

Jack smirked as he saw Rose's pale features light up at last. "Well, you could name her after your mom."

The look Rose gave him made him laugh again. "Kidding!" he added.

"It just has to be simple," she insisted, "and memorable."

"You want something Raxacoricofallapatorian, then?"

Rose smiled again whilst her mother could be heard rambling away in the background - she was out in the hallway and seemed to be on the phone already.

"Shame it's not a boy," the Captain joked, "You could have called him Jack."

Rose chuckled another time, but couldn't help but feel a little sad. "I so wish he was here…" she lamented, "He'd come up with something."

"We'll find him one day," Jack whispered, giving her a friendly kiss on top of her head. "There's always hope."

And Rose's eyes widened - that was it! "Hope," she said, smiling slowly.

**TBC…**


	10. I'll Never Give Up On You

**Part 10 - I'll Never Give Up On You**

There was a knock at the door of the flat not two days after Hope's birth. Rose was alone for once with her new baby, with her mother in town doing shopping (and gossiping, no doubt), and Jack at work. She wasn't expecting anyone so she had no idea who it might be.

She had just got Hope off to sleep and was cradling the sleeping infant in her arms (she had found that the baby wanted to snooze more than anything right now, though the sleepless nights and nappy-changing duties had already begun), so she had to be as careful as possible as she walked to the door and pulled it open. She could not veil her surprise when she found none other than Mickey, laden with gifts, on the other side.

"Hi," he said, giving her one of his friendly smiles.

She suddenly felt a bit self-conscious over how she looked - two days after giving birth, and little care or attention to herself on her part, must have meant that she looked a little worse for wear - but part of her knew that Mickey wouldn't care. They had known each other too long for that.

"Hi," she eventually replied. "I wasn't expecting you. Come on in."

Mickey's eyes quickly settled on the little girl in Rose's arms as he passed, but he made no remark and just held up his hands toward her, showing off the goody bags and balloon he had brought along with him. "I got you and your kid a few things," he said, smiling kindly, "Not much, like… just a teddy and a balloon, and some chocolates for you - make sure your mum don't see them, though, or you won't get a look in."

Rose could only smile at him as she closed the door. "You're so sweet, Mickey," she said, "You didn't have to."

"Yes I did," he insisted.

They looked at one another in silence before Rose led him into the lounge.

"Thanks for coming over," she said. "It's really nice to see you again."

And she meant it. Their last confrontation had ended so badly that she had quite wondered if she ever would ever see him again.

Mickey took a seat, with the pink 'Baby Girl' balloon hovering by his side, and watched Rose lower herself carefully into the chair opposite. "You're looking good," he said.

She gave him a 'yeah, right' look, so he held up his hands in defence. "I'm only being polite!"

"I look terrible, Mickey," she asserted jokily. "The Doctor wouldn't have…" And then she trailed off. It wasn't really the best time to talk about him. It made her feel emotions she didn't want to show in front of Mickey; and she was certain that he hadn't come round to hear yet _more_ about the Doctor…

Her caution had come to late though for an uncomfortable silence swiftly ensued, and the ghost of the Doctor now lingered in the air between them. The silence wasn't breached by either of them, though - it was Hope who made the next noise, waking up and emitting a little moan of protest which made Mickey smirk. "Well, are you going to introduce me?" he asked.

Rose gave him a quick glance then nodded. "Sure. Come over here."

He got up and walked behind her chair, looking down over her shoulder at the baby in her arms.

"This is Hope," Rose said, keeping her voice low.

Mickey smirked at the tiny little girl. "She's cute," he said. "Looks a lot like you."

"Do you think?"

"Yeah."

Hope shifted slightly and waved her tiny hands about for a moment before settling again. She then opened her eyes and seemed to stare at the stranger over her mother's shoulder for some time. Mickey stared straight back.

"She's got his eyes, though," he added.

Rose swallowed and looked at him again ruefully. "This must be hard for you," she murmured. "It feels awkward enough for me, so I can't imagine --"

"Forget about it, Rose," he interrupted quietly. "We've all had to make our choices, and that's that. We're still good friends, right?"

Rose nodded in response. "Of course." It sounded like Mickey had done a lot of thinking over the past few months and had forced himself to come to terms with a lot. Rose respected him so much for that, for his sheer goodness and integrity, and it made her realise how much they had both changed since the Doctor had walked into their lives.

Hope broke out into a well-timed infantile grin just then, which was so adorable that it couldn't fail to melt any heart, and it made Mickey laugh to see it.

"Can I hold her?" he asked.

"Sure," Rose said, further amazed by his composure. She couldn't help but feel more than a little uncomfortable, nevertheless, and was certain that, as hard as Mickey was trying to keep up appearances, he was feeling more than a little ambiguous toward her baby. It was almost the last insult the Doctor could have thrown at him.

Regardless, Mickey took the little girl up in his arms and rocked her. "The whole neighbourhood seems to know about her," he explained. "Your mum just doesn't know when to quit, does she?"

Rose rolled her eyes; Hope was only two days old, yet the world knew she had been born. "Mum _will _tell everyone…" she sighed. "I'm surprised she hasn't got in touch with the tabloids yet."

"Oh, they'd love that," Mickey joked, "'Alien baby born in London flats'."

For a moment, Mickey's voice had taken on a slightly spiteful hue, and it made Rose's face drop. She knew he hadn't meant anything by it, and he was quick to assure her, when he realised exactly in what manner he'd just spoken, that he hadn't meant any offence - but the façade was broken. They could never get back their trusting friendship of before, and they both knew it. The Doctor would always be there in-between them, if not in person, then in the form of his child.

"Do you think he'll come back?" Mickey then asked, trying to be realistic.

Rose hated the subject of the Doctor's return more than anything. She couldn't help but look at her child, the last vestige of the Doctor, and feel those terrible tumults of emotion reel about in the pit of her stomach all over again, those flashes of fear and dread, and of wondering whether Hope's father would ever come back. She had to bite down on her lip to prevent herself from crying, but her uneasy silence told Mickey all that he needed to know, that Rose would never give up on the Doctor, just like he would never give up on her.

He sighed and tickled Hope's belly with a finger, watching her tiny hands flail at his and grasp onto him. "You really loved him, didn't you?"

Rose looked up at him another time and met his gaze. "Yes," she confessed plainly.

He nodded, returning his sights to the Doctor's baby. "He's very lucky," he said.

Rose really felt like crying now. The more Mickey talked, the more she kept thinking 'what if the Doctor _is_ dead?', 'what if he's really not coming back?', 'what will I do then?'. She kept herself in check, though, and got to her feet to take her child back.

"What if he doesn't come back, Rose?" Mickey asked again as he handed Hope back over. "What will you do? You can't wait forever."

Rose clutched her daughter tightly and said, "He _will_ come back. I know he will."

It was all she could say, because she had to believe it was true.

**TBC…**


	11. Doctor Who

**Notes:** I know some of you have been reading this since it was first published (a good 10 months ago! Eep!), so you might not quite remember the earlier chapters as well as some of the "newer" readers. This chapter links with Part 1, so if you're a bit confused, go back and read the end of part 1 to bring yourself up to speed again. :) One of you guys alsomentioned in your review that I don't often update, and you're right, I don't. I "take my time", so to speak, when I'm writing a big story, because my writing suffers if I rush myself, but I do still try to keep my updates fairly regular. Feel free to nag me if the wait gets too long in-between updates, though. :)

Enjoy!

* * *

**Part 11 - Doctor Who**

_Five years of Rose's life later…_

"Did he tell you his name?" Jack had asked.

And Hope had replied, "Yeah. Doctor."

And then Jack was off.

He rushed down the stairs from the Tylers' flat, taking two or three steps with every leap, and swinging round the banisters as he took each corner, until he got to the ground floor and torpedoed out the door. His feet pounded over the flagstones as he sprinted in the direction of the park, the place where Hope had just encountered a man they had been praying to see again for a long time.

"DOCTOR!" he roared as he reached the children's play area and ran around it like a lunatic. He got more than his fair share of strange looks from both the kids and their parents alike who were in the vicinity, but he didn't care; some things were more important than pride.

He eventually came to a stop in the centre of the park and then turned round and round on the spot, looking in every direction for that familiar leather jacket. "Doctor!" he yelled again.

As he took one final sweeping glance of the place, he noticed that a young couple sat on a bench nearby were staring intensely at him, and they drew back in terror when he suddenly resolved to walk in their direction; "Hey," he said, disregarding their apprehension, "Have you seen a man round here wearing a leather jacket and dark jeans? A good six foot tall with blue eyes, rather large ears, and --" But the couple rapidly shook their heads - they were just desperate to get rid of him.

Jack heaved a great sigh. "Well, thanks anyway," he said.

The Captain wasn't to be discouraged, though, and he made a circuit of the playground, asking the same question to every individual in sight - a trio of nattering young mothers, an elderly couple, four young boys playing football, and so on and so forth - but he received the same negative answer from each and every one of them. No one had seen the Doctor.

"Damn," Jack cursed as he mooched away from the park and began to make a hasty search of the surrounding streets. Maybe around one of these corners he would see the TARDIS…? Maybe he'd bump right into that rough-and-ready Time Lord any second…? But he walked street after street, and checked car park after car park, and found no sign of the man.

As this failure sank in, the knowledge that he and Rose had been _so _close to being reunited with the Doctor again, and had missed out by mere minutes, Jack slumped down onto a bench and stared numbly into space. How ironic that the Doctor had gone straight to young Hope earlier and not realised who she was…

He smirked at that thought before he realised that the darkness was setting in, so got to his feet and began to walk home.

----

It must be said that Rose hadn't been sat idle whilst Jack was out searching. She, too, had shot to her feet as soon as Hope had told her about the stranger named 'Doctor', but (not being the Rose of six years ago) she had refrained from running off in pursuit. Instead, she had given her mum an apologetic look and asked her to keep the tea warm in the oven, before she and Hope had walked back to the park together, hand-in-hand, where she had then asked her daughter to tell her again what had happened.

Hope pointed out the slide beneath which she'd met the Doctor, and explained his movements to her mum, whilst Rose, having not seen him for so long, desperately tried to picture it all in her head. She could just imagine it, her Time Lord rushing around with his sonic screwdriver, dashing at full pelt across the tarmac whilst his coat flapped about in his wake. And to imagine him kneeling down beside their daughter, and talking to her with all the friendliness and flippancy she had come to expect from him! That was such a wonderful thought.

It was a bittersweet thing, really, to know that he had been sat beside Hope and not realised - had not even _considered_ - that she was his own flesh and blood. But one did not always see the obvious if one wasn't looking for it.

Rose went and knelt down on the spot where Hope told her the Doctor had sat, and she ran a hand over the ground, as if this was as close as she could get to feeling his skin beneath her fingers again.

It wasn't long until the sky overhead began to look overcast, though, so she and Hope walked back home, and all the way Hope was full of questions: 'Why do you want to find him, mummy?', 'Why are you so worried, mummy?', 'Why were you touching the dirt, mummy?'… why, why, why. Rose wasn't sure whether or not to answer. The subject of the Doctor had been taboo for the past few years, as if, for some reason, they had all become afraid to speak of him, and of the possibility that he might come back. Or worse, the possibility that he might not.

The fact was, Hope didn't _know_. She had never really questioned why the space of 'daddy' was vacant in her household before, she had just accepted it, but she was getting to the age where she would soon realise that it wasn't normal not to have a daddy at all. Rose knew that it was high time she came clean with her little girl.

Jack still wasn't back when they reached the flat, and Jackie had disappeared, leaving a note on the mantelpiece ('Gone to see Colleen - be back around 8pm'), so Rose and Hope ate their tea without them and then waited. It wasn't until seven o' clock that Jack mooched through the door. He found Rose sat with her daughter at the dining table, where Hope was drawing in her sketch book with some chunky wax crayons.

"I'm sorry," he said with a shrug, wearing a long face. "He's just vanished. As he always does."

Hope swung her legs against her chair as she coloured in her picture, whilst Rose just nodded and ran her fingers through her hair. She simply couldn't understand what was happening. "Why would he do this to us?" she asked. "Why would he come back and not come to find us first? He must know we're here."

"He must be here for a reason," Jack mused, slumping down onto the sofa, "But for what…?"

"He was lookin' for someone," Hope piped up, eyes not leaving her picture.

Rose and Jack both looked at her at once, wishing she had mentioned this before.

"But he needed to find the two hearts first," she continued, putting down her crayon and showing her mum her drawing. It was a stick man facing what looked like a trash can with a telescope for a nose.

Rose smiled. "What's your drawing of, sweetheart?"

Hope looked at it again with pride. "That's the Doctor and that's a monster," she said. "I just saw it in my head."

Rose's visage paled and she exchanged another glance with Jack. Sometimes she felt at a loss to be able to help, or even understand, her very special daughter.

Jack then broke the uneasy silence. "Two hearts," he muttered, staring at Hope's bright blue eyes whilst the girl, in turn, stared intently at her drawing. Then his own eyes widened. "No wonder he found you, honey," he murmured before he looked to Rose and said, as if the answer was plain, "_Two hearts_ - the Doctor was looking for someone with two hearts." He pointed at Hope. "And he's found her."

Rose had suspected as much. "But why?" she asked. "Why's he searching for two hearts?"

Jack put his hand to his mouth and shook his head. "I don't know…"

"Coz someone else is lookin' for the two hearts," Hope added.

Rose felt suddenly sick as her child's words aroused a natural maternal instinct within her, that of a mother turning to panic as it seemed apparent that her child was in danger; death was the Doctor's constant companion, after all - would it now haunt his daughter?

She looked at Jack again and her face was so filled with worry that it made the Captain feel perturbed as well.

He turned back to Hope. "Do you know who else is looking for the hearts?" he asked her.

Hope made another shrug. "No."

"We've gotta find the Doc'," Jack resolved without question. "He needs to know about Hope."

"Hope needs to know about him," Rose countered. "I should have told her years ago."

Hope looked up as she heard her name but, again, didn't say anything.

"It's not the time nor the place," Jack rallied.

"She has a right to know. My mum never kept anythin' from me, no matter how old I was."

"Yes, but your father died in an accident, Rose. This is a bit more complicated."

Hope left them to banter and slipped off her chair, taking her drawing into the kitchen where she stuck it under a magnet on the fridge.

_/'I'm the Doctor, by the way. What's your name?'_

'_Hope'_

'_Nice to meet you, Hope. Now go home, and forget me.'/_

"Mummy?" she called.

There was a slight pause before Hope heard her mother rise from her seat in the lounge and come up behind her. Rose then crouched by her side and rested her hands on her shoulders, looking at the new picture now mounted on the fridge. "That looks nice," she said.

"The man…" Hope went on, staring at the two blue blobs that were her stickman's eyes. "He said to forget him."

Rose rubbed Hope's shoulders and leant her head against hers. "He would say that."

"When'd you meet 'im?"

Rose stared at the stickman and smiled, a feeling of nostalgia flushing through her veins as she remembered her very first encounter with the Doctor. She also felt that Hope's question had been an odd one, as if her daughter somehow already knew about the past. "Before you were born," she replied.

"Who is he?"

Rose stared a little longer at the drawing before she turned Hope about to look at her and said, "He's your daddy."

----

/Time Lord./

Words in her head… images suddenly given meaning…

/Time Lord./

The monsters came to Hope again that night. She saw them, hundreds and thousands of them, their eyestalks raised, their laser arms firing. There were bodies in the streets, fires in the buildings, ships in the skies, and then there was mummy, rushing toward her, shouting at the top of her voice! Her face was creased in terror and her aura was full of fear.

The surroundings changed. Hope was inside a spaceship now, surrounded by the monsters. There was Uncle Jack there, too, and daddy, and then there was mummy again, running toward her…

But before mummy could reach her, one of the monsters rose up from the shadows and yelled, "Exterminate!", and mummy was gone…

"Mummy!"

Hope sat up in bed, screaming, whilst tears rolled down her face. It wasn't long until her mother was at her side, though, and her grandma was stood in the doorway as well, wondering what the cause of the furore was.

"What is it?" Rose asked Hope in a whisper, stroking her daughter's hair and holding her in her arms.

Hope threw her arms round her mother in return and clutched her tightly. "Mummy," she sobbed again.

Rose exchanged an uneasy glance with Jackie whilst she held Hope in her arms and tried to soothe her. After a while, Hope's chokes and sobs faded to soft whimpers, and Rose whispered, "It's okay," whilst she stroked her child's hair, "It was just a dream."

"Monsters…" Hope murmured. "I don't want the monsters to come."

"There are no monsters here, sweetheart," grandma said.

"And even if there were," Rose added, wiping away her daughter's tears, "I would never let them get close." She then offered Hope a smile and said, "Now go to sleep."

"I'll try," Hope said, laying back down whilst her mum tucked her in and kissed her goodnight.

**TBC…**


	12. The Oncoming Storm

**Part 12 - The Oncoming Storm**

It was perhaps two weeks later, during one evening, that the sky became thickly overcast, and the clouds, rolling over one another in great, slothful waves, began to rumble with thunder. There was a flash of lightning before the rain came pouring down and the atmosphere darkened. The air tasted electric.

Hope stared out of the lounge window and pressed her nose against the glass as the rain thundered against it in harsh waves, creating quite a clamour. The temperature then suddenly dropped, making her breaths mist on the glass, before, with another flash of lightning and crack of thunder, all the lights in the flat - and across London - went out. There was a power cut.

Hope turned around, hearing her grandma blaspheme as _Eastenders_ blinked off on the TV. This was followed by a teasing cheer from Uncle Jack, and a laugh from her mum.

"Thank God for storms like these," Jack chortled. "It's saved me from another half hour of torment."

Jackie gave him an evil glare. "Shut up, you - it was just getting good."

"Yeah, it was," Rose agreed with a nod. To Platform One, she may have been, but she still enjoyed her melodramatic soaps.

Jack shook his head. "Can't get into it, ladies." He then turned to Hope and said, "What d'ya say, Hope? You with Uncle Jack on this?"

Hope gave him a smile and a nod. "Yeah. 's boring," she replied.

Jack laughed. "Two on two. Oh, we need another vote to tip the scales…"

There was then another great flash of lightning, and the ensuing rumble of thunder was so loud that it made Jackie shriek. "My God, it's gonna be a bad'n, isn't it?" she murmured a second later.

"Too right," Jack agreed, getting up from his armchair and standing behind Hope at the window. He then watched as a fork of lightning arced down over the horizon. "Gees…" he added, "Not good at all."

And it was then that Hope was overcome with the tingling, cold sensation that all too often frequented her. It felt like there were icicles rushing through her veins, and she knew at once that the danger the Doctor had foretold was coming was now here…

Rather than saying anything about it, though, Hope just raised a finger toward the misty window, as if she were compelled to do it by some unearthly force, and began to draw a picture in the condensation.

"Now Hope, that'll make marks!" Jackie nagged from behind, but Jack turned to her and said, "Give the kid a break, mom. It'll take you two minutes to polish these windows again."

Jackie pulled a face, telling him that that wasn't the point, but Jack ignored her, and placed his hands on Hope's shoulders as she continued to doodle. "Wha'cha drawing, sport?" he asked.

Hope drew a rounded head and an eye stalk, then two ear-like appendages, followed by a dustbin shaped body. It was now that the word she'd sought after for years emerged from her mouth, as if it had always been there, just waiting for the right moment to be uncovered. "A Dalek," she replied.

Jack's smile vanished as he watched the simplistic Dalek take shape on the window, and he felt a little unnerved. Somehow the image seemed so very sinister since it was coming to life from the tip of a child's finger. "Why you drawing that, honey?" he asked whilst Rose paced anxiously to his side and watched the Dalek materialise in turn.

"I see them a lot," she said. "Daddy and the Daleks."

Jack's brow furrowed and he looked at Rose, who shook her head in uneasy disbelief. No one had ever mentioned the word Dalek since before Hope's birth - how could the child even know of them, never mind draw one?

"They always fight," Hope continued before her finger stopped, the outline of her Dalek now complete. She then began to add the final touches to her picture, starting with the spheres on its flanks. "They fight near here," she added, "right near home."

The image of Hope's Dalek sent a terrible chill down Rose's spine, bringing every single horrid memory of the real things floating back to the surface - the time in Utah when she had been cornered by one in the vault; the time when she had been surrounded by them in the fleet; the memories of their merciless screeching and barking; the way they seemed to treat you like you were nothing…

She swallowed, shaking her head, and felt suddenly unable to bear seeing that ghostly apparition on the steamy window any longer. She therefore stepped forwards and quickly wiped her hand across the glass, erasing the monster.

Hope watched her creation disappear without a word, but, as soon as Rose had wiped the image away, there was another flare of lightning outside, one which illuminated the skies and brought something wholly unexpected into view. Jack and Rose stared up in horror as they saw, in the heavens, as if they'd come straight from the year 200,100, the great Dalek fleet!

"Oh my God," Rose gasped.

Jack swallowed, and Jackie soon crept up behind them to take a look in turn at the terrifying scene, and for once she was lost for words. She had to stagger back into her seat again just to collect herself!

In contrast, Hope just stared impassively at the saucer-like ships as they rotated steadily in the skies, making no remark of surprise or fear. It was as if she had been seeing them for every day of her life.

Then, out of the blue, just to heighten the tension, there came a sudden knock at the door!

Everyone jumped at once, and spun around, staring down the dark hallway toward the front door, but no one made a move. It wasn't until the knock came again, more persistently, that Hope freed herself from Jack's hands and began to make for the door.

"Hope, no," Rose whispered urgently, taking her daughter back into her grasp and holding onto her tightly. She then looked to Captain Jack who, rolling back his shoulders and taking a deep breath, decided that it was his responsibility to go and see who it was.

The thunder continued to rumble as he paced anxiously down the hall, and every hair on the back of his neck was standing on end. His only comfort was to know that Daleks couldn't knock on doors. (Or would more likely just run through them.)

As he reached the door, the knock came another time, but much more insistently, so Jack, with one deep breath, reached out quickly and wrenched the door open! He then found himself staring with wide eyes at--

"Hello."

--the Doctor!

Jack shrieked with laughter and gathered the man into a lung-crushing hug. "Oh my GOD!" he cried, holding him so tight that the poor man almost went blue. "It's you! It's really you, you bastard! Rose, come quick, it's the Doctor!"

The Doctor disentangled himself from Jack and looked at the man with a little concern. "What you trying to do, asphyxiate me?" he asked, rubbing his arms before, without a chance to recover, Rose was suddenly there, launching herself upon him.

The Doctor suppressed an 'oomph' as he stumbled back a little from the door and tried to maintain his balance as he felt several kilos-worth of Tyler hanging from him.

"Doctor!" Rose said, clutching him round the neck and beaming with delight, "God, it's really you."

"Yes, it _is_ really me," he said, prying her off, "But at the rate you guys are going, there won't be much left of me soon."

He then set Rose down before him and gave her a smile, seeing now properly the joy in her face, a face glowing with happy tears. "Hey, no crying now," he said, cupping her cheek in his hand and stroking her skin, "Can't be doing with that."

He then dropped his hand and was suddenly back on duty, pulling his sonic screwdriver from his pocket and pointing it in the direction of Rose's sitting room. "Hmm…" he pondered as it went crazy, "I think you might have someone here that I've been looking for."

Rose finally calmed down and turned to look toward the lounge, where Jackie and Hope were stood in the doorway. The little girl stared up at the stranger from the park, a man she had been told was her father, and wondered now what to do. For the time being, she just hung around the doorframe, near her grandma, and bit down on her fingernails.

The Doctor stared at the girl and remembered her immediately. "Hello again," he said with a smile, before his face regressed to a more sombre expression. He stepped inside the flat, shaking some of the rain from his jacket, and asked, glancing for a second back to Rose. "Is she a relative of yours?"

The lightning flashed again, followed by the roaring thunder, and Rose slipped her hand into the Doctor's, just as she always used to, and said, "Come and sit down."

"I don't have time, Rose," he replied, giving her a significant stare. "There's a Dalek fleet in the skies, in case you haven't noticed."

"I know," she said, "But this is important."

"And talking of importance, Doc'," Jack added sarcastically, shutting the front door behind him, "thanks for taking some time out of your busy schedule to come and see us so soon. I mean, just a phone call would have done, just to let us know you were back, y'know?"

The Doctor sighed and looked again at Rose, giving her a rueful look. "I'm sorry," he said. "I've got a lot on my plate."

"You've got more on that plate than you think, mister," Jackie snapped, folding her arms and taking on that mother-in-law-ish aura she commanded so effortlessly. "Come and sit down. Now."

The Doctor blinked in utter disbelief and shook his head - there might be an alien invasion at hand, but domesticity and Jackie Tyler went on. He therefore let Rose lead him into the darkened sitting room, where he took a seat and watched everyone convene uneasily around him, each regarding him like a bomb about to go off. It didn't relax him in the slightest.

"I'll explain about the escape and all later," he assured Jack and Rose in turn, trying to dispel the taut atmosphere, "Y' know, about the Daleks and whatnot."

"Don't worry about that," Rose said. It just felt like too long ago to bother dredging all that back up again now.

He nodded and looked again at the little girl, staring deeply into her eyes. "So, how long we been apart?"

"Six years this end…" Rose replied.

The Doctor's brow rose. "That long, eh?"

"Don' I look any different?"

He looked at her hard, studying her visage carefully. "Nah," he said at last. "you still look like Rose Tyler to me."

"And Hope," Rose said, inclining her head in the little girl's direction. "What does she look like to you?"

The Doctor's brow furrowed in befuddlement, but his expression altered from mild to serious confusion in a matter of seconds. He held his screwdriver out toward the child once again and it bleeped more and more vigorously the closer it got.

He quickly pulled it back and flicked it off, swallowing hard. It _was _her, there was no question about it - she was the other person with the two hearts. And yet this all meant that there was a far more important issue to be addressed right now. The girl had told him that she didn't have a daddy when they'd met in the park, hadn't she…?

"Rose?" he murmured, staring again into Hope's blue eyes before he looked back at her for answers.

Rose smiled at him and nodded.

But the Doctor couldn't bring himself to say anything. He just sat there, looking totally lost, as if he didn't want to suggest anything lest he make a fool of himself.

It was thus left to Rose to bridge the gap, as usual. "Hope," she said, gesturing for her daughter to approach, "aren't you going to say hello?"

Hope walked to her mother and was lifted into her lap. "Hello," she said to the Doctor.

As if stopping the Dalek fleet hadn't been enough… The Doctor felt a little sick. He realised that there was only one thing he could see in this child's eyes, and that was himself. But surely that was impossible…?

"Rose?" he murmured again.

Rose chuckled gently at his vulnerability and said, just to put him out of his misery, "She's yours."

Jack had to try not to laugh - the Doctor's face was a picture.

"Mine?" the man gasped.

"Yeah," she said.

"Yes, yours, you irresponsible rake, you," Jackie now blustered whilst the Doctor gave her one of his most helpless stares. "Typical man, getting my poor daughter up the duff then turning your back. I should have known…"

"Mum!" Rose protested, "Leave him alone. I told you wot happened…"

Jackie opened her mouth to respond but was silenced by another flash of lightning and loud bang of thunder. And before anyone realised what was going on, the Doctor had shot to his feet and left the room.

**TBC…**


	13. The Last Dance

**Notes:** At the end of the chapter. :)

* * *

**Part 13 - The Last Dance**

The Doctor got up far too quickly for anyone to be able to obstruct him, and was out the door and onto the colonnade within seconds. His chest was so tight he could scarce draw breath, and his eyes were burning with tears. Everything had fallen onto his shoulders so rapidly that he had no idea how to even begin to deal with it.

The situation hadn't been made any easier by the fact he'd been in such a small room, with so many eyes on him. He'd felt like a lab rat being monitored by a group of scientists, all waiting to see how he would react to their latest experiment. But this was no mere chemical reaction - this was something monumental, and which he'd never thought would happen to him. At least not again.

He was soon at the bottom of the stairwell and running out at full pelt into the downpour. His feet thundered against the concrete pavement as he wove in-between the monolithic high-rises and ran on aimlessly down the dark, deserted streets, ignoring the storm as it raged about him. It was only when his breath got too short for him to be able to go any further that he finally dropped to his knees and sat there, alone, in the rain.

The Doctor had no idea how long he remained there, dazed and bewildered. Water was trickling through his hair and dripping off the end of his nose (the phrase 'looking like a drowned rat' could never have been more appropriately applied), and the rain was still coming down so heavily that it had soaked right through to his skin… but he hardly noticed.

The cool rain helped to relieve his surprise and panic and he soon managed to start thinking a little more coherently. Since there were a million-and-one thoughts zipping through his mind, this was no easy task, but he knew thathe had to make a start, and fast.

The Doctor swallowed and looked up at the overcast skies. His eyes could just about pick out the great, circular silhouettes of the Dalek fleet as they hovered high in the heavens, waiting out the storm. He thought he'd had problems when he'd just had the Daleks to deal with, but now - now things had become domestic.

As he lowered his sights, he forced his procrastination aside and let that other significant detail dominate his thoughts, the one he could not run away from or avoid: the fact he had become a father.

Granted, this wasn't the first time - he had been called dad before, but not like this. There had been more control before, he was sure of it, and it had felt so long ago… Things had changed so much since then, himself more than anything. Family was something he could no longer afford, or even trust himself to have. How was he supposed to deal with this?

He half wondered why he hadn't thought of it before, of the possibility that the two hearts the TARDIS had located might have been of his own making.

When push came to shove, he could only blame himself. He should have kept himself under more control, like he had for so long before, and never allowed himself to go so far with Rose. If he had, the Daleks would only have had _him _to hunt down. Now they had another of the Time Lord race, be they hybrid or not, to pursue.

"What have I done?" he murmured, running his hands over his face and shaking his head.

Another form of guilt now joined the string of others he carried. It wasn't so much the fact that he'd accidentally created a life, but more the fact that, by doing so, he'd brought a death sentence upon it from the moment it was conceived. How could he have been so irresponsible? How had he allowed his love for Rose to blind him so profoundly? Why had he not taken a moment to think of the consequences of his actions?

Consequences. He almost choked at the thought of such a thing. What did he know of consequences…? He always left before he had to face them. But not this time. Now he had no way out, and part of him was glad of it. It was about time that he stopped running.

Before Rose had walked into his life, he had had no family or friends to take care of, which in turn had meant no responsibilities or liabilities, no chances of anyone he loved getting hurt or in harm's way (after the destruction of his home world, he refused to have it otherwise), but this strict isolation had come at a cost. He hadn't just been isolated, he had been lonely, and this state of solitude had made him so miserable that he had been unable to resist inviting Rose to join him after their first excursion together. They had just got on so well; he couldn't describe what it was about her that he liked so much - he just loved being with her, and they made such a well-balanced team. It was as if they had been destined to be together.

And so, with Rose coming on board, the TARDIS had become a shared space for the first in a long time, and, just as Rose had noted very early on, it _was _better with two. Danger after danger had come their way, and they had faced each one together, hand-in-hand, and had come out on top every time. They had had their tiffs, to be sure, but every adventure had given them more respect for each other, and had brought them closer, until they had gone so far that a choice had had to be made - either they gave in to their love, or they cast it aside once and for all.

All in all, Rose had taught him so much about how to feel, about how to be emotive and to express himself, that he found he could not in the end deny her the affection she deserved (and, more importantly, which she wanted him to show her). Their love had now cost them both even more than he anticipated, and their innocent daughter would now suffer because of the fact he was her father. What was he to do?

He got to his feet and slowly began to walk back to Rose's flat. He was completely drenched, the rain having not given up in the slightest, but the solitude had at least given him the time and space he needed to overcome the hardest parts of his dilemma. He now had to think about where to go from here, for not only was there a Dalek invasion at hand, but he had Rose and a daughter to protect from it.

Oh, and a world to save. Again.

---

The Doctor's abrupt exit had left everyone back at the flat with a feeling of unease, and yet, despite her better judgement, Rose had decided not to rush off after him - this was something the Doctor had to contend with on his own, at least to begin with. It was now several hours later and Jack had gone home for once, whilst Jackie had taken Hope into her bedroom to read her a story. Rose assumed that Hope had fallen asleep in there by now since it was getting late, and she was glad that this left her to face the Doctor alone, whenever it was he decided to come back. They needed some time to themselves.

It was midnight when Rose finally heard the front door go, and she got up from her seat in the lounge before walking into the hallway to face the Doctor. It was a sorry sight, seeing him standing there so forlorn with water dripping from his every angle.

"You're soaked," she sighed with a shake of her head.

She walked up to him and took him by the hand, leading him into her bedroom before she disappeared for a few seconds and returned with a towel. "Off with it," she said, taking hold of his heavy leather jacket and peeling it away from his shoulders.

He didn't say anything, but cooperated, and let his jacket slide from his back before Rose tossed it over a chair and threw the towel round his neck. She then began to rub his hair and neck dry whilst he just stared at her.

"Jumper," she said next, looking him straight in the eyes for a moment before glancing away.

She stood back with her towel whilst he pulled the soggy offending article off, then continued with her drying.

"I wish you'd say something," she said at length, running the towel down his chest to his belt. "I hate it when you're quiet."

The Doctor peered about Rose's darkened room. There was a clear partition on one side where Hope's bed was separated from her mother's by a chest of drawers and a small curtain (It appeared that Rose and her mother hadn't been able to secure a larger flat or house from the local council, since Hope was sharing her mother's bedroom), but Hope was not there now. He then looked across the walls, which were still recognisably pink, even in the gloom, and gave Rose a frown. "How do you sleep in here?" he asked. "It's death by pink."

Rose couldn't help but break out into laughter - it had been so long since she'd heard that wonderful flippancy in his voice, that charming but blunt humour, and she could do nothing but embrace him whilst he gave her a grin and held her in return.

"You're so cold," she murmured as she ran her hands over his skin, passing her fingers through his hair and flicking yet more water out of it. "And wet!"

He sighed and looked down. "I just had to get out of here. It was too much. It still _is _too much."

Rose nodded, understanding that it could hardly be easy for him. He hadn't been away from her anywhere near as long as she from him, and for him to return to find he was a parent in so little time must feel more than overwhelming. Then again, she was sure she had come out of things the worst…

"I missed you," she whispered.

"Thought you might," he smiled.

"Did you miss me?"

He laughed sadly. "I've hardly had time to miss you," he confessed. "It's been a few days."

"Really?"

"Really."

She shook her head, the TARDIS' ability to leapfrog through time disconcerting her not for the first time. She then just closed her eyes and revelled in the simple feel of him, of hearing his voice and feeling his breaths dance over her skin once again. The tears were also threatening to burst forth from her eyes, but she held them back; after all these years of not knowing whether he ever would return, and of wondering what had happened to him, it was pure emotional overload to have him in her arms again, like he had never been gone.

They held each other in silence for a long time, but the air was tense, like they both had words balancing on the tips of their tongues, waiting to be said… yet neither had the courage to utter them.

Eventually, the Doctor decided to take the plunge. "Rose," he said. "I never thought… It just never occurred to me that…"

She smiled at his unease. The Doctor was rarely vulnerable, but he was irresistible when he was. "You never thought you'd get me pregnant?" she suggested bluntly, trying to help him.

He hesitated a bit and then pried himself away so he could look at her properly. "Yeah," he conceded, walking a short distance away and staring out of the window into the heavy rain. "I've just brought so much on you… Left you alone without explanation, to raise a child and…"

Rose was beside him before he knew it and she gave him one of her brave faces. "It's all right," she said.

"But it's not," he countered, "Can't you see? All this" and he gestured to the ships in the sky "is because of me, because I couldn't keep my--" He faltered again as he searched for an appropriate phrase.

Rose broke out into a furtive smirk and said, "Your screwdriver in your pocket?"

He turned on her with what started as a look of surprise, but soon melted into a smile at her plain forwardness. He put his hand to her face and leant his forehead against hers. "Yes, that," he chuckled, before, a little timidly, he stooped down and pressed his lips against hers.

Rose moved her hands quickly to take a hold of him and keep him close as they kissed, treasuring the moment. After so many years apart, yearning for the man she loved, it was hardly surprising.

When they finally parted, staring at each other with a renewed fervour, Rose remembered something she'd been meaning to ask him and placed her hands flat against his breast. "You never told me you had two hearts," she said, feeling for the echoing beats as they followed one another within his chest cavity.

He looked down at her hands and smiled, resting his palms atop of hers. "Must've slipped my mind."

"I gathered," she smirked, before she leant forward and pressed a kiss to his chest. A shudder ran through his body in response and it made her grin even more.

"Rose, it could be the last night on earth…" the Doctor said, knowing where this was leading and unsure that it was appropriate.

"It could have been the last time," she rallied, feigning a look of innocence.

He opened his mouth to speak again, but Rose beat him to it and placed her fingers to his lips. "The world doesn't end because the Doctor dances," she said quietly as she leant up toward him.

He looked her over carefully and realised, once again, that she had a point. And so they shared one of their moments of mutual understanding before she led him to her bed and they danced.

**TBC...**

* * *

**Notes:** I downloaded a 9/Rose video a while back by **Satine and Ellie** which used the song "Last Night on Earth" by Delta Goodrem. That song is now permanently cast in my mind as a 9/Rose thing, and was responsible, in a way, for this chapter. :) It's a great song if you haven't heard it before. Another song responsible for the Doctor's actions early on in this chapter is the Foreigners' "I Want to Know What Love is", which has the most perfect lyrics for his character (though the song's not great). The Doctor never originally ran off after he heard thr news about his daughter, but the more I re-watched the Ninth Doctor onscreen, the more I felt that he'd react quite strongly to the situation, and so off he went into the rain! (Which is sexy imagery, anyway, so reason enough. LOL.) 


	14. The Dalek Invasion of Earth

**Title: **Choices

**Status: **WIP

**Rating: **12

**Pairing: **Nine/Rose

**Notes:** Sorry for the wait! XD Thank _Torchwood_ for the update.

* * *

**Part 14 - The Dalek Invasion of Earth**

There was a faint humming sound coming from outside. It woke Rose from her slumber and she turned to see the Doctor also awake and staring at the ceiling. It was still dark, in the early hours of the morning, and the invasion was at hand.

Rose ran her hand up over the Doctor's chest, happy to find him still here this time round, and watched him turn to look at her.

"What is that?" she asked. "That noise?"

"The Dalek ships," he replied. "They're here, searching for me. They've found out too much, but they still need my help. Now they're locking onto anything that has two hearts. That means me or our child."

Rose felt a shudder of fear run through her as he said this. "They would invade this planet just for two people?"

"They'd destroy a planet for nothing. An invasion might seem merciful in comparison."

Rose held him tighter. "What do they want from you?"

"Our lives."

She couldn't help but be gripped by terror as he said this. She didn't want to think about what fate might befall her child if she didn't do something to protect her. "Then take Hope away," she said, sitting up. "Take her in the TARDIS, to somewhere safe."

The Doctor smiled sadly at her brave resolve and sat up to face her. "No, Rose," he whispered frankly. "I can't keep running. They will always follow me - they have the ability to, now - and…" He paused for a solemn breather. "I can't leave you behind with them. You know I can't."

Rose stared at him for a moment longer before she made a slight nod and turned her eyes down.

"Rose?" the Doctor said next.

Rose met his gaze and listened.

"She's beautiful," he said.

Rose smiled - he was talking about Hope.

"I don't know why I didn't see it before," he went on, staring into the middle distance. "Her nose and her ears are just like yours. Which is fortunate."

"But she's so much like you, too," Rose insisted, clasping his hands and tapping her fingers against them. "She has your eyes. And you'll have to watch her at play - she's just so spontaneous, and she can flick her moods on-and-off like a switch."

His brow creased. "Do I 'flick' my moods on-and-off like a switch?"

"Yes."

He made a face that said he'd never realised it before, only to make a prime example of such behaviour and say, suddenly sombre, "Oh Rose… do I deserve so much? Or you so little?"

She watched him carefully and all the while remembered the Doctor she had first met all that time ago, that seemingly untroubled and independent man who had done what he could, wherever it was he had landed. And when his job had been done, he had just moved on, breaking all ties he had made to the people he had saved, and leaving them all to their own devices. She had been an exception to his rule, a person he had met and taken on board - even grown a bond to - and he had paid the price for it; with love came a certain amount of responsibility, and he was now trapped and bogged down. There was no doubt that he loved her, and she could see he was fascinated by the miracle of creation that had brought him a daughter, but he was unsure how he felt about it all. _'__I don't do families'_ he had once said to her.

"Being 'domestic' isn't that bad," she insisted.

He didn't say anything, and eventually his mood-switch just flicked again and he flashed her one of his manic grins. "Up and at 'em!" he said, patting her leg, "We've got a planet to save."

---

It wasn't quite four o'clock in the morning, yet Jackie was up with the rest of them. (She hadn't realised until now that there even _were _two four o'clocks in the day.) She sat in her dressing gown at the table in the lounge whilst the Doctor and Rose bustled about like they were preparing for a day at the office, not a day saving the world.

It was Rose's decision that the Doctor should take charge of Hope this morning and spend some time getting to know her; after his run-out last night, she was unsure as to how Hope must now feel about her father, but it was incredible to see just how smoothly both Hope and the Doctor settled into the parent-child routine; they simply held no apprehensions toward one-another at all. All it had taken was a little chat at the start of the morning, and thereafter they had bonded incredibly quickly. In fact, Rose had felt more than a little moved as she watched the Doctor ensure Hope ate all her _Ricycles _and brushed her teeth. He seemed to be a natural.

When team-Tyler was all set, the next task was to call on Jack. Rose elected to go upstairs and fetch the Captain, which gave her a chance to see the scale of the invasion at hand, the sheer size and of the ships making her feel very small indeed. As she reached Jack's flat, she gave the door a knock but was a little disconcerted when she saw how glum he looked when he answered.

"It's Eugene," Jack explained. "He's not come home."

Rose glanced again at the Dalek fleet that was so thickly gathered in the skies, creating such a shadow over the earth that one might wonder whether it was truly dawn or not. Was Eugene's disappearance related to the situation at hand…?

Rose and Jack returned to the Tyler's flat together and everyone assembled in the living room, where the Doctor was listening to the news on the radio with Hope sat on his knee. (Since the electricity was still out all across London, the battery-powered radio was all they had.) The Brits were already starting to panic, the armed forces were being called in, and a curfew had been instigated nationwide. The rest of the world was, in the meantime, watching the situation with "great interest". And no doubt with great fear, as well.

"Eugene's not come home," Rose reported, perching on the arm of the Doctor's chair.

"Who?" he asked, concentrating on the news report.

"Eugene," Jack filled in. "My flatmate?"

The Doctor glanced at him, then turned to Rose. "You think it's connected?"

She gave him a look which said 'wouldn't it surprise you?'.

"If they've hurt him…" Jack growled.

"Easy Captain," the Doctor cautioned.

"Well, what's the plan?" Rose asked.

"I'm trying to think," the Doctor rallied. "But we have to keep Hope away from them, at all costs."

Hope exchanged glances with her father before she began to fiddle with his jacket. He didn't seem to mind.

"Why?" Jack asked.

"Because she's my daughter," the Doctor replied. "They want us both."

"Then it follows that we need to keep you away from them, too, Doc'," Jack surmised.

The Doctor gave him a dark frown. "It doesn't matter about me."

"Oh yes it does," Jack argued.

The Doctor opened his mouth to counter, but Hope interrupted. "I want to come," she said.

The Doctor smiled sorrowfully at her. "It's too dangerous for you."

"But I'm a Time Lord."

Rose frowned, sure no one had called Hope a 'Time Lord' before, or ever even mentioned the words to her - yet she seemed to know, as if the words had been ingrained into her mind since before her birth.

The Doctor smirked at her another time. "It's dangerous for teeny time travellers, as well," he insisted, tapping her on the nose, "They've come for you, you know, which makes it even more dangerous."

Hope looked a bit put-out, as children who are refused things always tend to be, but she said no more about the matter, and just began to search out her father's pockets whilst he looked out of the nearest window and mused on things.

"Why now?" Rose asked. "Why have they come now?"

The Doctor's frown told her that he didn't understand what she was asking, so she elaborated. "Hope's five years old. Why didn't they come when she was six, or when she was an adult, or when she was born?" She shook her head gently, her eyes resting on her child. "Why _now_?"

"Good point," Jack agreed, "Why have they come now? It would have been easier to abduct Hope as a baby, wouldn't it?"

The Doctor looked between them and said, "You're thinking like humans."

Rose and Jack exchanged a pair of glances which unmistakably said 'well what did you expect?'

"Time travel's a difficult art," the Doctor explained, glancing at Hope as she pulled a banana from his pocket. "It's hard to get it right all the time."

"Don't I know," Rose murmured.

"And," the Doctor continued, pretending to ignore that remark, "since the Daleks are a tad inexperienced in the art, then they're hardly gonna get it spot-on, are they? It's enough to be able to trace someone through time, never mind arrive at the exact instant you want on top of that."

"Okay, you win!" Rose said with a mock cynicism, "Point to the Doctor."

The Doctor offered her one of his 'told you so' grins.

"Moving on," Jack said. "The next question is what are they waiting for? The storm's stopped now, so…?"

All eyes were on the Doctor for his next smart aleck response.

The Doctor's face froze as he pondered on this until a wave of realisation overcame him. "It's for the same reason," he deduced, "The Daleks aren't good at time travel. It'd take more than a storm to keep them up there – they actually need the time to recover."

"Recover?" Rose echoed.

The Doctor looked at her and nodded. "Yes. They get sick, you see, like you might when you travel on a ship or plane."

Jack laughed, but bitterly. "Daleks get travel sickness?"

"_Time_ sickness," the Doctor corrected him. "They haven't got used to it yet. They've managed to copy the technology but they've yet to perfect it to suit them. Or they've yet to find a way to evolve so that they suit it."

"So they're getting over their sickness right now?" Rose murmured. "Just sitting there, defenceless?"

"Then let's attack now!" Jack resolved.

"Don't be foolish," the Doctor retorted, "a sick Dalek's a dangerous one."

"Don't I know…" Rose muttered again.

"But still a vulnerable one," Jack pushed on. "Let's take the fight to them."

"I'm not dropping the TARDIS into their hands for a second time. It's too dangerous."

"What use is she to them now, though? They've got their time travelling technology."

"Exactly, which will give them every reason to destroy the master copy. I won't have that."

Rose glanced out the window and a thought suddenly hit her. "Doctor, where _is_ the TARDIS?"

The Doctor pointed upwards whilst Hope pulled a broken compass out of his pocket. "She's on the roof," he said.

"You left a big, blue box on the _roof_?" Jack exclaimed. "My God, Doc', why not just put neon flashing lights round it saying 'Here's the TARDIS - come and get it'?"

"She's well protected," he assured them. "I'm not that stupid. So long as I don't use her, they might not even notice she's there."

Jack and Rose exchanged glances, really hoping that that was the case, whilst Hope found a seven-sided dice in the Doctor's coat next. She began to roll it over and over in her hands, and looked with enthusiasm at the pretty alien digits carved into it.

"C'mon, we need a plan!" Jack enthused.

"Right, let's recount the facts - throw 'em at me," the Doctor said.

"There's a giant fleet in the skies," Rose began.

"Okay."

"About 200 ships," Jack estimated.

"With more than two thousand soldiers aboard each one," the Doctor added.

"Two thousand?" Rose gasped.

"Yup," the Doctor nodded, "so we have our problem: how to get rid of half a million Daleks, with the minimum amount of effort and bloodshed. Any thoughts?"

Everyone exchanged vacant glances.

"We could barely manage _one _before," Rose stuttered, "and there are thousands out there. What're we gonna do?"

"Not hang around here chin-wagging, presumably," the Doctor riposted.

"But what do they want with us?" Jackie asked from her corner of the room, completely confused by it all and sick of being left-out. "Why have they come here?"

The Doctor turned on her. "Pay attention. They don't want you, they want me, or my daughter. That's all they're interested in." He gave Hope a glance and ran his hand over the back of her head, before continuing. "They tracked Hope here from the future, but I escaped from them and tracked _them _here before they even arrived - after tracking me of course. They made a blip in the Time Vortex, y' see, that had never been there before, which I traced, thus tracking them before they arrived tracking me."

Everyone blinked, dumbfound.

The Doctor ignored the awkward silence and continued regardless. "I was then hoping to find the two hearts before they did so I that could sort out this mess… Now I've found them and haven't a clue what to do."

"Don't tell me you're making up your 'plan' as you go?" Jack asked.

The Doctor smirked. "As per usual."

"Well won't the army hold them off?" Jackie queried. "Surely they'll do some good?"

The Doctor laughed bitterly. "Your amateurish soldiers against _that_? Fat chance."

Jackie made a face at him whilst Jack spoke up again. "It may be a fat chance but it's all we've got right now. Perhaps I can help them out, and give you guys more time."

The Doctor gave him a long, serious stare then nodded in concurrence. "Yeah. They could use a guy like you. Hop to it, see if they'll take you onboard."

There was a slight darkness about Jack right now that Rose had never seen before and it intimidated her - this was Jack the soldier, the former Time Agent void of two years' memory, whose flat-mate had possibly been taken from him by the threat above, and who was not in the mood to party.

"Well if the Psychic Paper doesn't work," Jack murmured, half to himself, "I've got another trick up my sleeve." He nodded his farewells to the group, waved Hope goodbye, and then departed.

Rose and the Doctor then stared at one another.

"Just you and me," she said.

He nodded, but his face was bland and full of concern. He didn't have a plan, and he was lost without one.

Jackie made a loud sigh after a while. "Well, if you two are off saving the world, you'd best leave Hope with me. I'll not have you being a bad influence on her."

The Doctor pulled a face, partially because of the 'bad influence' claim, but more because he wondered at Jackie's ability to take care of his daughter. Rose gave him an admonishing little push before her mum could see him, though, and said quickly, "Sounds like a good idea. All we need now is a plan."

The Doctor again stared into space and racked his brains for some inkling of a strategy, but he could find nothing to inspire him.

After a while, though, he heard Jackie mutter, "First shop window dummies, now this…" And suddenly something clicked in his head! His thoughts raced, twisting, turning and calculating until they followed through to conclusion and he laughed out loud in disbelief.

As Hope pulled a final item out of the Doctor's jacket, he leapt to his feet and lifted his girl into the air, swinging her around in his arms. He then set her down and stared at Jackie with an air of total incredulity. "Jackie Tyler," he said, "You are a genius!"

Jackie looked bemused - more because of the compliment than anything - but in the end, she could only exchange a smile with Rose and hope that the Doctor did have an idea. Hope, meanwhile, just giggled and hugged her father as he took her back up in his arms, having every faith in him.

She also kept her most recently acquired item held securely in her fist…

**TBC…**


	15. The Long Goodbye

**Notes:** I originally had a silly little scene planned where the Doctor, Jack and Hope passed the time away by playing _Mousetrap_. Unfortunately I can't find an appropriate place for it any more, but it was an idea I really liked. :)

Anyway, yes, I've been very naughty, very distracted, and have done very little writing over the past few months. I love this story and it will be finished before season 3 (minus 10 days!), or I give everyone free license to cast me into dust and throw me across the expanse of Time with the Emperor Dalek. XD The 'time off' has given me more ideas on how to make this story maybe slightly more cohesive, and I've added a further bit to the end, so I'm feeling good about it overall. I've enjoyed spending time with Nine again as well because I miss him. I love Ten very much now, but Nine is still my special Doc'.

Reviews are love, constructive criticism is a big help, and Ninth Doctors are worshipped. :) I've written this at such irregular intervals, too, I expect inconsistencies to crop up at some point. Let me know if you find any.

* * *

**Part 15 - The Long Goodbye**

Rose was in her room, tying up her shoelaces and zipping up her jacket, as she prepared to leave with the Doctor on another excursion - perhaps the last one ever. This time, though, there wasn't just fear and excitement in her heart; there was horror. What if she didn't come back? Would Hope be all right without her? The Doctor had told her _'You don't have to do this,'_, and yet she had replied insistently, _'Yes I do_.' Despite her uncertainty and dread, there was no other answer.

The Doctor had perceived her pain as she had said those words, though, and knew as well as she did that her feelings on the matter were ambiguous. However, he hadn't tried to dissuade her, for he knew, and respected, that she was quite capable of making up her own mind.

The Doctor himself was hovering in Rose's bedroom doorway right now, waiting for her. He watched her blow her hair out her eyes, get to her feet, and fidget with her jacket a little before she finally turned in his direction and looked across the room at him. He stared right back, his face unreadable.

Rose glanced away again. "This is so weird…" she confessed, letting her eyes linger on Hope's bed. "I always hoped, but never thought I'd be doing this again." She allowed herself a smile before reconnecting her eyes with the Doctor's. "Another adventure," she added.

The Doctor nodded mutely, holding her gaze.

Rose sought for something to fiddle with as the atmosphere around her began to feel increasingly uneasy. Spotting her hairbrush on the bedside unit, she reached for it and began thrusting it through her hair. "So tell me," she continued as a thought suddenly crossed her mind. "How does Hope know? About the Daleks. She seemed to know their name as if someone had told her about them years ago..."

"So you didn't tell her about them?"

Rose shook her head. "No, why would I?"

The Doctor's brow went up in a way that told Rose he was rather put out by this; "Well, I just presumed you would've," he said.

'_Did you even tell her about me?'_ was the unsaid question which hung in the air afterwards, and Rose could read the Doctor's vexation in the mere way he looked at her, letting the silence speak for him. The worse thing was that Rose couldn't deny she had neglected to tell Hope anything about him, at least not until very recently, and this knowledge filled her with guilt.

"It's not so easy, you know," she said, wondering whether she was saying it for his benefit, or for hers. "You can't tell a child these stories and expect them to just live with them. I mean, what happens when they go to school, and tell their friends that there are 'real' monsters out there, and that their daddy is--"

"One of them?"

She looked at him with a deep, puzzled frown, unsure whether he was joking or being deadly serious. He had used that indistinguishable tone of voice which could have meant either thing. "No…" she murmured cagily. "But for Hope to go and tell everyone her dad's an alien, or some kind of super hero--"

"I'm no hero."

Rose shook her head, deciding to ignore that comment. "Look, just answer the question."

"What, Hope's knowing about the Daleks?" He shrugged. "Well, I don't know. Her potential is unmapped in all areas of intelligence and ability. She's a hybrid of both our races, so who knows what whims nature has taken with her?"

This seemed true enough so Rose didn't try to delve any deeper into the mystery. And to bring her quickly back down to earth, as soon as she put down her brush, her mother intruded on the moment and walked into her room with Hope in tow.

"So," Jackie asked, weaving around the Doctor as if he were a piece of furniture, and worthy of as much attention as such, "have you decided on a date yet?"

Rose's face was blank and she looked to the Doctor for help, but he simply exchanged an identical look with her, begging her to tell him what on earth her mother was on about this time. Rose threw him another look in return, saying that she hadn't the slightest idea, then dared to ask her mum, "A date for what?"

"Getting married, of course," Jackie said, as if it were obvious. She lifted Hope up into her arms and smiled at her grandchild, before looking between Hope and the Doctor just for a few seconds, seeming to gauge their similarities, just in case there had ever been any doubt. Satisfied that they were perhaps far too alike, she turned away again, and just in time to miss the glare the Doctor gave her. (And what a glare it was - Rose was quite surprised not to see a hole burnt through her mother's skull.)

Rose stifled a laugh, one which was half mirth and half embarrassment, then managed to compose herself enough to stutter, "Married?" After all, it wasn't exactly an appropriate time to raise the subject; or perhaps it was.

"Yes, married," Jackie continued in the face of adversity, daring to turn and give the Doctor a prod in the chest. "I want _you_ to make an honest woman of my daughter."

The Doctor had to give himself a moment to recover before, pretending to check his watch, he said, "Sorry, is my watch wrong? I thought it was the twenty-first century - not the nineteenth!"

Jackie pulled a face at him. "Oh, it's like that, is it? Have your bit of fun then go? No commitments?" She scoffed. "You're just like the rest of them." She caught Rose's eye and added, specifically for her, "You see, he's nothing special - the same as all the rest."

"Mum," Rose finally managed to sigh, a little sternly. "Just leave it. We've got enough to think about."

"And we're not getting married," the Doctor had to add as Rose slipped past them all, and he quickly followed suit.

Jackie refused to get off her soap box, though, and, placing Hope back on the floor, she continued, "She still doesn't know your name, does she?"

The Doctor heaved a deep sigh, trying to keep his cool at a time when he really couldn't afford to lose it. He did his best to simply ignore her whilst Rose opened the front door.

"Haven't you asked him his name?" Jackie meanwhile called, looking past the Doctor to Rose.

"'Course I have," Rose replied, glancing outside at the ominous sight in the skies before she ushered the Doctor out onto the colonnade, "He's the Doctor."

Jackie cocked her eyebrows. "Oh we've heard this before. Doctor what?"

"Just the Doctor," Rose assured her.

"He must have a proper name."

"Well he must have a good reason for not telling me."

"Yeah, just in case his other wives find out."

The Doctor rolled his eyes and Rose groaned in frustration, giving up on the matter and throwing her hands into the air in defeat.

Jackie wasn't out of steam yet, though, and she looked again at the Doctor as he brooded quietly in the rear. "Silly girl sometimes, isn't she?" she said. "She's had a child with you and she still doesn't know your bloody name. Hope's a Tyler as well, you see, since we haven't a clue what _the father's_ name is!"

The Doctor, hands in pockets, forced his mouth into a strained smile. "Jackie," he said, looking straight into her eyes, "as much as I'd love you for a mother-in-law, can we please drop the subject of matrimony and think about the rather large invasion that's at hand?" He nodded up toward the dark sky.

Jackie sighed, glanced upwards for a brief moment, and folded her arms. "Oh all right. But you can't avoid it forever."

"No," he agreed, "but let's keep some perspective."

Hope, a silent spectator of this adult exchange, looked up at her father at this point and asked, "What are you going to do?"

The Doctor gave her a grin. "Daddy's got a plan," he said. "It's a long shot, but it's all we have."

Rose felt her brow knot a little at this. The Doctor's plan was still a complete mystery to her, and she gathered she wouldn't be finding out about it until he had begun to implement it. She just prayed that it worked.

It was at that exact moment that Hope looked up at her mother and, when their eyes connected, Rose felt a strange, unearthly thrill course through her, feeling as if her mind had been pervaded by her little girl. She shuddered, half wondering if her every thought and fear had been read and absorbed.

Hope stared a little longer, then simply broke away as if nothing had happened, and looked up at her father again. "Don't be long," she uttered with more maturity than one would expect.

The Doctor smiled again, but sadly, and was indecisive for a moment as to whether or not he should lower himself to Hope's level and hug her; he was finding this all hard enough to deal with as it was, and he wasn't sure that indulging in further domesticity would help. He ultimately chose not to, and turned quickly to Rose before he changed his mind. "Are you ready?" he asked her.

Rose swallowed and gave him an assertive nod. "As always," she replied. Her tremulous tone gave away her unease, though; they were both afraid, but that had never stopped them before.

The Doctor turned back to the flat one last time. "You be good for granny, okay?" he called to his daughter.

"Yeah," Hope replied.

"Good girl," he smiled, watching as Rose suddenly made a dash back inside to share a farewell hug with her daughter.

"Take care," he heard her whisper, before she kissed Hope's forehead and held onto her for as long as she possibly could. She then reluctantly got back to her feet and looked at her mum.

"She'll be safe with me," Jackie assured her, reading Rose's mind. Her tone was suddenly so quiet, though, that one couldn't help but feel the gravity of the occasion. Rose then gave her mum a quick but heartfelt hug, before she returned to the Doctor's side, took his hand, and they were off.

**TBC…**


	16. The Nestene's Legacy

**Notes:** As always, reviews are love, constructive criticism is a big help, and Ninth Doctors are worshipped. :) I have no beta ATM, and since I was sick earlier, I might have slipped up on the proof-read.

_7 days to go…

* * *

_

**Part 16 - The Nestene's Legacy**

"So what _is_ the plan exactly?" Rose asked the Doctor as they marched along the colonnade. She tried to sound chipper, but it was proving more difficult than ever.

"We're going back to the beginning," he replied plainly.

Rose responded with a look of perplexity, which encouraged the Doctor to flash her one of his grins. "You'll see," he said.

"I'll have to, won't I?"

Seeing as the Doctor had said the TARDIS was on the roof, Rose did wonder why she found him leading her down the stairwell. "Where are we going?" she asked as they trundled down the concrete steps. "I thought you said --"

"I did," he nodded, cutting her short, "we're taking the scenic route."

"Scenic route?"

"Yeah," he replied.

It was very dark on the estate as they crept out of the stairwell, the sunlight eclipsed by the huge diameter of the Dalek saucers, which were hovering increasingly closer to the surface. In fact, if one dared to watch any of these ships closely enough, one could perceive the regular deployment of the Dalek divisions, spurted forth from the ship's many orifices. These troops would glide smoothly through the air, keeping in formation all the time, and each with but one aim in mind - to kill. Where these constant spates of Dalek infantry were heading seemed unclear, but the Doctor was cynical in his speculation, maintaining that wherever there was a high volume of people, the Daleks would soon be found.

As throngs of panicking residents on the Powell Estate rushed to their cars around them, trying in vain to escape the invasion, the Doctor took Rose by the hand and calmly walked her through the madness, his eyes scanning the vicinity as if he were searching for something. His gaze settled at last on a pair of abandoned bicycles, which were wedged in-between the large metal bins near the Chinese Takeaway. He smirked and immediately looked to Rose. "How are you on a pushbike?" he asked.

Rose's face told him it was out of the question, but he utterly ignored her. "C'mon!" he said.

* * *

There were tanks crawling along the streets of London, helicopters were flying low in the air, and large cannons were being set-up all over the shop, ready to face-off with the alien threat. Jack felt quite at home, he had to confess, for this was the kind of situation in which Captain Jack Harkness thrived, and where he was truly alive - out on the battlefield.

He made his way casually through petrified hordes of refugees, which some soldiers were trying but failing to keep in some semblance of order, and looked around for the head honchos of the military operation. He could see some corporals, a sergeant or two, and even a captain, but they weren't what he wanted. He needed someone who was higher up and decidedly superior, for only with them could he truly play his cards; so he continued with his search, walking through the bands of militia as if he were one of them (and he might as well have been, since no one stopped to question him. It seemed that no one dared; Jack had too much of a presence about him).

The Captain eventually found his way to a group of red-beret-wearing privates, who were cradling some rather impressive rifles in their arms. He rose a brow at their guns and looked at each man in turn. "Good morning, gents," he said, approaching them, "Nice hardware."

The men exchanged wary glances with one another, then looked back at Jack. "And who are you?" one of them, a youthful-looking man with short, blond hair, asked.

Jack gave him his charmer's grin and held out his psychic paper. "Capt'n Jack Harkness," he announced, "I believe I can be of some assistance to you all."

Three of them checked his I.D. before something of a silent conference ensued, each exchanging glances with the others, until it was decided that this needed to go higher. "You'll be wanting to see the brigadier then, 'Captain'," another of them said, inclining his head toward a van behind them.

Jack glanced across at the typical green-and-brown camouflaged truck and gave a nod of thanks to the company before heading on his way. He felt the burn of their uneasy gazes on the back of his head as he went, but he paid it no heed; he could understand that they were all on edge, terrified of what they might be up against in the approaching battle, after all - and who could blame them for feeling that it was _not_ in their best interests to add a dashing stranger to this equation, no matter what his fancy I.D. said?

When Jack reached the wagon, he knocked on the window, and had to wait but a few seconds before he was met by the stern visage of a red-haired, moustachioed officer who was in no need of an introduction. "Can I help you?" the man asked, his deep voice oozing authority in just the way one would expect.

Jack held up his psychic paper again for good measure and said, "I'm Captain Jack Harkness, sir, formerly of the US Marines. I'm here to help."

He watched as the brigadier's eyes studied his person intently, tracing him from head to toe and taking in as much information as he could from this initial analysis.

It was clear that the brigadier recognised in him a man who was not easily crossed, but it wasn't enough to sway him, and he could offer no reply except a mild smile which said that, although he appreciated his bravado, he couldn't possibly bring him on board. "I'm sorry, soldier," he said directly, "but things are just not that simple. You should know that."

"I do, sir," Jack countered, "but this isn't exactly a normal situation, is it?"

The brigadier gave him another look over. "No. But that doesn't give me the right to call up ranks from the civilian population."

"I'm not your normal civilian, sir."

"No, but very few people are. Good day, Captain."

The man was about to disappear back into his truck when Jack threw in his trump card. "If I mentioned Torchwood," he said, "would you be willing to forget convention and allow me onboard?"

The brigadier halted and wheeled about a second time to face Jack. His eyes studied him even more closely than before and, after a heavy pause, he got out the van and conceded Jack's victory. "Very well," he muttered at last, his hands on his hips. "Follow me, Captain Harkness. Let's talk."

* * *

It was funny how one's mind worked at times like this, when it looked likely that you would lose everything. Simple things quickly became much more significant, and what you took for granted yesterday, you dared not lose sight of today. Rose, for instance, suddenly found herself thinking over the reasons why she loved the Doctor. Perhaps she was trying to take her mind off things, but she didn't care - it seemed to be something worth thinking about, especially since this affection had outlasted his six year absence. It had a lot to do with his personality, she conjectured; it was so fraught with irresistible little mannerisms and traits, she simply couldn't help but be drawn to him. And his spirit was so akin to her own, as well; they were more than simply lovers, they were best friends and soul mates, and he made her life not just worth living, but fun to live, even in moments like this, when the entire world looked likely to crash down on top of her.

And, she thought furthermore, he was very fortunate that she loved him so much, or else she might have killed him for putting her through this.

"Keep up!" the Doctor called from ahead, letting his bicycle roll down an empty street as Rose pedalled furiously behind him.

"I _am_ keeping up!"

"No you're not, you're way back there!"

She tried to throw him a glare, but he was too far away for it to be effective. "Well, _someone _has much longer legs than me!" she thus attempted as a counter attack.

He scoffed. "No excuse. Try switching your gears."

"I'll give you 'switch your gears'," she murmured as she glanced at the confusing array of twenty-one that were set on the bicycle bars. She refused to touch the contraption lest she made things worse. She'd never got on with these flashy mountain bikes. Give her back her red bicycle from childhood any day.

"Why the Hell are we doing this, anyway?" she asked.

"Pardon?"

"I said, why the--"

"I can't hear you from all the way back there."

"Your ears are big enough."

"Oy!"

She smirked. "Thought you'd hear that one."

The Doctor pulled on the brakes and slowed down so that Rose could catch up. She drew up by his side and they shared one of their silent moments, exchanging humoured glances, before their eyes returned to the road.

"Right, say it again," the Doctor said.

Rose glanced at the dark sky, filled with 'flying saucers', then looked back at the road once more. "I said why are we doing this? It's ridiculous."

"What, cycling?"

"Yes, cycling's nearly always ridiculous - but cycling during an alien invasion kind of ranks pretty high in the most ridiculous things ever list."

"You think so?"

"Yeah. It's right up there with trying to claim you can triplicate the flammability of alcohol."

The Doctor gave her his pseudo-hurt look. "Well excuse me for my spur-of-the-moment originality. And I'm surprised you even remembered that word."

"What, triplicate?"

"No, alcohol."

He swerved out of the way as she threw a light-hearted slap in his direction, but suddenly his face fell sombre and his arm shot out toward her. Grabbing her roughly by the arm, he turned them both into a side street, and told her quickly to hide.

Rose was off her bike in a second, and they both hid in the shadows, keeping completely quiet, save for their breaths, their backs pressed flat against the red brick wall of a multi-storey office block.

After an agonising moment of utter stillness, a unit of Daleks broke the peace and slowly passed them by, floating down the middle of the road with their laser arms extended out front, and their eye stalks scanning the vicinity for human stragglers.

Rose watched them go by, then allowed herself a sigh once the coast was clear. "We could have avoided this by using the TARDIS to get from A to B," she pointed out sharply.

The Doctor's face was dour. "Possibly," he conceded. "Or we could have made things a hundred times worse."

They remained silent for a while longer before, checking that the Daleks were far away, and that no more were creeping up on them, they wheeled their bikes back out into the street.

"I want the TARDIS to be safe," the Doctor explained. "If they destroy her, I'm stuffed."

"No, you'd be stuck here."

"Exactly, stuffed."

They mounted their bicycles and pushed off, eyes darting every which way now that their senses were on the alert.

"Now bikes the Daleks don't care much for," the Doctor rambled.

Rose stifled a laugh. "Well that I can understand. I can't see one of them ever riding one."

"Bikes are safe, y'see. They're not like your cars, which just break down far too often, and blow up far too easily. They don't rank as dangerous local technology, either, like some of your cars do, 'cause they don't have an engine, they don't have a navigator, they don't have--"

"Anything going for them," Rose mumbled.

"Trust me, the Daleks are hardly gonna fret if they _do_ catch sight of us."

"Oh no, they might only kill us - if they don't die laughing first."

The Doctor ignored the latter half of her comment. "If we're quick enough, they won't have time to kill us. We have far more chance of bailing off of one of these than we would from inside a car."

"Can you even drive?" Rose challenged.

" 'Course I can drive! I had a nice little car once. She was yellow."

"Just like Mickey's first car."

The Doctor grimaced at her. "_Nothing _like Ricky's first car."

"You never even saw it."

"Still nothing like it. Trust me."

Rose sighed and let it drop. "I still say the TARDIS would've been better," she insisted.

The Doctor shook his head. "Rose, you've gotta stop trying to take the easiest path. It's hardly satisfying."

"No, but it's usually the least embarrassing. I'll never live this down if mum finds out."

There was a significant pause, filled with nothing but the sound of rotating pedals, until the Doctor added, "Or worse, if our daughter does…"

* * *

Despite Rose's doubts over the Doctor's reasons for taking them pedalling into London city centre, it was rather amazing how right he was, and how little attention was paid to them. It seemed that the tanks, cannons and other rather large and impressive pieces of machinery were much more attractive to the Daleks' thirst for destruction than a pair of unimposing cyclists. (And of course, their were thousands of screaming, panicking people rushing around like headless chickens, just asking to be slaughtered. If Rose hadn't given the Doctor a reason to stop insulting the human race, he would have called them 'stupid apes'.)

And so Rose followed the Doctor right into the heart of London, zipping down the abandoned roads with an ease that surprised her. Occasionally they would have to steer around some piles of burning rubble which littered their path, each one standing testament to where the Dalek offensive had already left its mark, but the rest of the journey remained Dalek-free.

Rose found herself wondering again at length where exactly the Doctor was taking her, until he suddenly braked on the bridge over the Thames, near the Embankment, and she skidded to a halt by his side. When she looked at him, he was smiling.

"What?" she asked.

He gestured to the locale. "Bring back any memories?"

There was a huge blast from the other side of London and Rose flinched. "Yeah, _that_ reminds me of when some strange man blew up my job."

He groaned. "No, not that."

She allowed herself a moment to look around and, after noticing that the London Eye remained unscathed, gave him a genuine, heartfelt smile. "Of course I remember. This is where we had our first adventure."

"Yup," he nodded. "And what happened on our first adventure?"

"You shanghaied me into service."

He blinked. "Not quite the lingo I would have used, but yes. And what did we face underneath the big wheel?"

Rose bit on her lip. "The Nest-… what was it called? Nestey? Nestin?"

"_Nestene_ Consciousness. Righto."

It was Rose's turn to blink at him whilst another blast echoed out from across the city. "And what's that got to do with us pedalling to the centre of London whilst the sky falls around us?"

The Doctor looked up. "The sky isn't falling."

She rolled her eyes and he quietly laughed at her. "Come on," he said, "We're nearly there."

And Rose grudgingly put her feet back on the pedals and set off after him. Wherever he went, she would follow, after all.

**TBC…

* * *

**

**NB: **The _Torchwood_ reference went into this chapter before the spin-off TV show started last October (which tells you how long I've been working on this), so it's in no way meant to hint toward anything like that. I was just having fun with what "Torchwood" could possibly mean. :)


	17. Delta Wave

**Notes:** 5 days to go. Eep! I wanted to publish a double-whammy, but it might have to wait until tomorrow or the day after. I'm not happy with the way I wrote some of this, but I fiddled about with some of the paragraphs so many times, it got a bit silly, so I've left it before I do more harm than good. XD There are a few parts that I love, however, which is always nice. It makes a change to please oneself for once.

* * *

**Part 17 - Delta Wave**

_And then she saw something, something that she knew wasn't really there. It was a large, metal robot with a rounded head and a bulky body. The head had a long stalk sticking out of it, and a pair of flashing lights mounted on top, whilst the body was embossed with many rounded spheres, and coated in a grubby, golden finish. It had two long, thin arms held out before it, from its midsection, and it glided along the ground as if on steady wheels, for it had no legs. Overall, it looked somewhat comical, and yet it was frightening, too; there was something about it which sent a terrible chill through Hope's body, a chill which told her that this thing was a bringer of death and of worse._

"Daleks," Hope murmured again, the name seeming to be part of her heritage, engrained into her very genes from the moment she was conceived. She had seen the Daleks often throughout her life, both in her dreams and also during her waking hours, where they appeared to her as ghosts, and stalked her every footstep. Perhaps she should have been afraid but, being five years old, any spates of fear this might have arisen in her soon passed.

Hope looked down and opened her hands and stared upon the shiny casing of her father's sonic screwdriver. She wondered how it worked, remembering back to the first time she had met her father, when he had been using the screwdriver, and it had led him to her. It had been all blinking blue lights and whirring noises then, but right now it was neither - it was just dead in her hands.

She didn't really know why she'd taken it from him, if she were honest; something about it had called out to her and demanded to be plucked from her father's pocket. It was as if something inside of her knew that she would need it very soon, like a message beamed down to her from future, giving her a glimpse of what was yet to come, and how best she might prepare for it.

She knew that something major was about to happen because her body was tingling all over with that terrible, cold sensation that always came with her every vision, every nightmare, and even with the Doctor himself. It felt stronger than ever right now, as if all the years of inexplicable emotions and visions in her life were to cumulate in one significant instant, which would send her over into either immortality or oblivion.

Of course, Hope didn't understand these eerie instincts or impulses that drove her on, or the visions from the future or the past. Like any young child, she had little capacity for suspicion, and she thought that whatever she felt the impulse to do, she had no reason to doubt it; if she was imbued to do something by the mysterious forces which had so far governed her life, then she would do it, simply because there was no reason for her not to.

So when Hope got up and pointed the screwdriver at the inert telephone, knowing instinctively how to work it, flicking a switch on the device and causing the telephone to ring, she felt no qualms or reservations about what she was doing - she just did it because she somehow knew that she had to.

She then stepped away from the phone and watched as her granny walked towards it.

There was more than a little apprehension on Jackie's face as she traversed the room (the phone was ringing during a power cut, after all), but what she didn't realise was that this momentary distraction gave Hope the opportunity to slip away. As Jackie picked up the head set, Hope was walking down the hallway toward the front door; when Jackie said "Hello? " into the phone's mouth piece, Hope was stealing out of the door; and when Jackie dropped the phone and ran after her precious granddaughter, Hope just closed the door on her with a slam of finality. With a further flick of the sonic screwdriver, Hope then welded the lock shut, and Jackie was trapped inside her own flat.

Hope could hear her grandmother's shouts and screams from the other side as she stood staring at the door for a moment, watching the woodwork vibrate as Jackie's fists pounded desperately against the wood, but she did nothing except turn and walk away, the sonic screwdriver clasped firmly in her hand. It was as if she were wholly possessed by some ethereal force…

So Jackie was left alone, both panic-stricken and afraid, powerless to stop her grandchild disappearing into the chaos beyond. She tried desperately, time and again, to open the door, and even tried to break the wood, just praying that Hope would come to her senses and return to free her, but it was all to no avail. She could only think that everyone she held dear was somewhere out there, fighting a losing battle, and all because the Doctor had dared to walk into their lives…

* * *

There were people screaming not far away. Rose could hear them. It was a necessary ingredient to every one of the Doctor's adventures, it would seem, the obligatory people-in-peril, who often lost their lives, and though she had experienced more death than she cared to admit, it never became easier for Rose to hear those shrieks of terror. She felt that there was simply nothing worse than hearing a person's death cry.

She and the Doctor had by now made it to the London Eye, and Rose was currently waiting as the Doctor tried to get them back into the derelict pit below. The hatch was causing him some trouble, and Rose was beginning to wonder whether or not to offer him some help, but he was in his single-minded, solo-mode, and she therefore thought it better not to intervene. This left her alone with her thoughts whilst more noises of the Dalek offensive reached her ears, followed by the screams.

"People are dying," she said, more to herself than anything, and watched as the Doctor finally managed to heave open the lid of the hatch.

"I know," he replied frankly, not looking up, and saying no more on the matter. He kept his eyes facing downwards as he clambered into the hole.

Rose inhaled a deep breath and followed suit. She dreaded to think what they might find below in the darkness - they hadn't left the place in very good condition, if she remembered rightly, so what on earth the Doctor had up his sleeve was beyond her.

It was indeed quite dark below and the air smelt of ash and burnt plastic. Rose coughed and squinted in the gloom. "This had better be worth it…" she grumbled. She could barely see two feet in front of her, so she was glad when the Doctor took her hand and led the way.

"Are you okay?" he asked her.

His tone was strange, not the kind she was used to hearing at all; it was both gentle and ill at ease.

"Yeah, 'course," she replied.

"Something's wrong," he added out of the blue.

"Don't say that already."

"But it is… I can feel it…"

Rose sighed. "You and your spider sense."

"Who said anything about spiders?"

They climbed over a few fallen pipes and treaded carefully across the rubble. Bricks, cement and dirt covered the area, which Rose was very glad she could hardly see.

"Doctor, please clue me in… why are we here again?"

"Mind your head."

There was a clunk as Rose proceeded to knock her forehead on a low beam, and swore in the same instant. "Thanks," she then grumbled, rubbing the smarting area.

"I did warn you."

"Two seconds too late!"

"You weren't concentrating."

"Well, gee, I wonder why! Not much pressure on us right now, is there?"

The Doctor's grip on her hand tightened as he guided her round the edge of what seemed to be a deep pit. "Take it slow," he told her.

"I am."

He looked at her. Rose knew this even though she couldn't see him very well. It was just that instinct, that knowing; they were keyed into one another in ways that many other people weren't, knowing innately when the other was upset, excited, depressed, or uneasy. It was one reason why they worked so well together, and why they had fallen so easily in love.

"You're very on-edge," the Doctor deduced.

Rose gave him a look of disbelief. "There's a Dalek invasion happening, and my daughter and mum are sat back at home in the middle of it. It's not hard to figure out why, Sherlock."

"First Spock and now Sherlock?"

"It could get worse. Trust me."

The ground shook for a moment, the foundations of the dilapidated underground building trembling in aftershock. The Doctor and Rose froze, waiting out the disturbance and watching for any further falling debris. Rose prayed that the whole framework wouldn't cave in on them, and clutched the Doctor's hand even harder.

"The Daleks are getting into the swing now, I think," the Doctor murmured.

"Thanks for that comforting notion."

The Doctor glanced at her again, attempting a faint smile, before he slowly started to continue on his way, guiding Rose along a small gangway, and then down deeper into the abyss.

"The Nestene Consciousness set up shop here," he explained as they descended down an uneven stairway (which seemed to be missing far too many steps for Rose's liking).

"But why?" the Doctor pondered aloud. "Why would it do that?"

Rose coughed as the heavy dust in the air lodged itself in her throat. "Wasn't it to use the wheel?" she replied when she could, spluttering in-between her words.

"Yup - but what for?"

They reached the bottom and the Doctor helped Rose down as her eyes continued to struggle to become accustomed to the gloom. She wished she could share his apparently superior senses once in a while.

"They wanted to turn it into some kind of transmitter, right?" she recalled.

"That's one way of putting it."

"But right, yeah?"

"Yeah."

She blinked at him. She could just make out the slight shine of his eyes in the dark. "So, why are we here again?"

He walked a little way across the floor and Rose attempted to follow him, tracing him by the mere sound of his footsteps.

"I hope you brought a torch or something…" she mumbled.

"Me too…" he concurred.

Rose lost track of him for a while until she walked right into his back.

"Well done, you found me," he said.

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, fancy that."

She could then hear him patting his jacket, looking for something.

"What are you gonna do?"

"A bit of rewiring. Take the Nestene's idea and remodel it."

He continued to search his pockets.

Rose reached out and began to help him - she quite wondered if his pockets used the same technology as the TARDIS, and were bigger on the inside than the out, because he could fit so much rubbish in them. "What have you lost?" she asked.

"Nothing… I never lose stuff."

"Right, you just skilfully misplace it - hide it so well you forget where you put it, right?"

"Spot on."

She gave up after a minute or two of fruitless searching, and backed off to let him continue his rummage alone. "So, rewiring…?" she asked in the meantime.

"Yeah," he replied, "Rewiring. Gonna turn this wheel into a transmitter again."

"Riiiight."

"You sound unconvinced. Don't sound unconvinced. I need someone to tell me how amazing I am."

She laughed a little. "Yes, that would be my job, wouldn't it?"

"Of course."

Rose thought that she saw him throw her that charming smile of his which she loved so much, the one which made her want to fall into his arms and stay there forever. She couldn't be sure, but was sure he had, and it infused her with a little more confidence.

"I'm gonna send out a wave from this wheel that's so powerful," the Doctor continued to explain, "it'll wipe all of those Daleks off the map."

"Wipe them out? Just like that?"

"In theory. It's called a Delta Wave."

"Delta Wave?"

"I've just got to hope that the transmitter is powerful enough, and that I can get it to work again, and that I can refine the settings, and… well, you get the idea."

"Wasn't the transmitter pretty well done-in? I mean, we _did_ bring the ceiling down on it and all, didn't we?"

"Yeah, but that was more the Nestene Consciousness' doing than ours. _I_ certainly didn't bring the ceiling down. Anyway, this is our only hope…" He was patting his pockets more vigorously now. "WHERE IS IT?"

Rose sighed. "_What_ have you lost?"

"My screwdriver!"

Rose stepped in front of him and brushed his hands aside, conducting another more thorough search. "And this 'delta wave'," she continued quietly. "I mean, if it's so powerful it can knock out a Dalek, what'll it do to us?"

The Doctor didn't answer but Rose knew that he was looking at her, and the words he failed to utter hung heavily in the air, as clear as brass.

"You can't do that," she told him simply.

"Then give me a better idea," he replied, his voice but a whisper in the darkness.

She shook her head, but returned her attention quickly to the situation at hand, where she found that the screwdriver seemed to be eluding her search as well. "It's definitely not here, Doctor," she groaned.

"But it must be!" the Doctor insisted. "It _has_ to be, I can't do without it, I --" And then realisation struck, and the air became thick with a sudden, heavy unease which was quite palpable to Rose.

"Doctor?" she asked.

"I said that I thought something was wrong…" he whispered. "And I was right."

Rose felt her stomach do a somersault. "What's wrong?"

But her question was met with nothing but silence. All she could hear was the sound of the Doctor's breathing, and the distant pounding of war from the surface above.

"Doctor?!" she demanded.

He grabbed her hand and ran back the way they had come, leading her without caution over the uneven and dangerous terrain. When they reached the decrepit stairway, he urged her up in front.

"Go, quickly!"

"What is it? Tell me!"

"Hope… it's Hope!" he shouted.

Rose turned and confronted him. "What about Hope?"

But he just gave her a firm nudge. "Rose, GO!"

She stared at him a moment longer, recognising the frantic, horrified aura in his manner and voice, but made her choice; she was going to hold her ground on this occasion. "No," she said, "not until you start talking to me. You can't do this all the time, you can't keep things to yourself!"

"We don't have the time for this, Rose."

"Ironic that, considering the company," she retorted. "I've been stuck here for six years without you, Doctor. I've raised a daughter that sometimes I don't even understand - I don't know what she sees, what she feels, or how to help her - and I thought that, when you came back, maybe you could make her life easier - but you can hardly help yourself!"

"Rose…"

"Tell me what's wrong!"

He took a few breaths then said, "Hope's in trouble."

"Trouble? What do you mean trouble?"

"I don't know… but I can feel it. I can sense it."

"Well that's all very well and good, but it's gonna take us a long time to get back since we _cycled _here!" She glared at him. "If any harm's come to her --"

The Doctor ground his teeth together and grabbed Rose by the arms, holding her steady and staring her in the eyes. "Listen, do you know _why_ I left the TARDIS behind? Do you know what the TARDIS was doing, sat up on your block of flats?"

She stared into his eyes, seeing up close how they burned with anger and rage. Part of her wanted to be afraid and shy away, but she somehow knew that none of this was directed at her - it was for himself.

She swallowed and gently freed her arms before she put a hand to either side of his face and tried to soothe him. "Tell me," she asked quietly.

The Doctor gently pulled her hands away from his face and said, "The TARDIS was protecting Hope. I set up a shield to hide her, one that went right over that building, and I'd hoped that it would be enough."

"And it wasn't?"

He paced around and tried to collate his thoughts. "I don't know," he confessed. "I just know that something's happened." He looked directly at Rose once more. "We have to get back. Fast."

"So much for your delta wave…" Rose sighed, suddenly even more afraid than she had been to begin with, and wasted no time as she rushed on ahead, back toward the surface.

**TBC…**


	18. To The Rescue

**Notes:** -_feels her mind imploding- _Oh, there's so much going on, and so much jargon in the next two parts, that I can feel my mind overheating. If all of this somehow makes sense, I'll be amazed. It might be best to park your disbelief at the door! XD

_Minus 2 days to go…_

**

* * *

**

**Part 18 - To The Rescue**

It took the Doctor and Rose far too long to return to the estate, though no period of time could have been short enough. Matters hadn't been made any easier by the fact that they'd only got so far on their return journey before Rose had hit some debris and punctured a tyre. The Doctor had then attempted to carry her on the back of his bike, which he hadn't found easy (in fact, Rose had seriously wondered at one point whether or not they were going to get going again), but he had been adamant that he could do it. And he had been right, or he managed to find his centre of balance and pick up a surprising amount of speed in a relatively short space of time. Rose could only think that he was as anxious as she was to find their child safe…

As they had finally scooted into the deserted estate, Rose had leapt off the bike first and charged straight toward her tenement, completely ignoring the fact that there was a fire burning in the block of flats behind her. When she was about halfway there, though, the Doctor somehow managed to overtake her, his turn of speed astounding, and beat her into the stairwell. She lost sight of him somewhere up the stairs, and drove herself on as fast as she could so that she could meet him up on the colonnade as soon as possible, but she hurtled so quickly through the doors and round the corner toward her flat that she didn't realise the Doctor had stopped short. She thus ran straight into his back.

"Oomph," she sighed, stumbling backwards onto the floor with a thud. She shook her head as she tried to collect herself before she peered past the Doctor's legs towards her front door, she saw Mickey stood there - with a fair-sized axe in his hands!

"Mickey!" she yelled in panic, wondering what on earth was happening now.

Poor Mickey was equally shocked, having practically jumped out his skin when he laid eyes on the pair, and wasn't sure whether to be overjoyed or terrified. He quickly realised how outlandish the scenario appeared, though, and, giving the axe a mortified glance, lowered it by his side. "Rose," he smiled, then with a curt nod, "Doctor. It's not wot it looks like. She's stuck - locked in. I'd come round to, y'know, help you out, offer you a lift, perhaps, but - the door, it's jammed. Sealed."

Rose returned to her feet and slid past the Doctor. "Say it again" she asked.

Mickey took a couple of deep breaths, but was half afraid to carry on, owing to the Doctor's dark countenance and visibly exhausted state, but this all changed when Rose touched him on the arm, giving him the courage, with just this simple gesture, to ignore the Doctor and answer the question.

He swallowed again. "Your mum's stuck inside, Rose. She can't get out. She's been screaming and shouting in there for ages. It's the lock, summit's bin done to it. It's sealed tight."

"And Hope?" the Doctor demanded before Rose could even get a word in.

Mickey looked back at him and shook his head. "I dunno," he replied.

The Doctor surged forward and pushed Mickey aside. Rose gave him a scolding look, but he wasn't paying attention. With a superhuman kick, which should have left his leg well and truly shattered, he managed to break down the firmly sealed door and splinter the lock. He watched it swing back on its hinges to reveal a scared and shaken Jackie stood within, her face tear-streaked and covered in the dregs of her mascara. The Doctor had no time for her, though, and didn't listen to a single word she blurted at him as he marched inside and frantically checked every single room for his little girl.

"Doctor!" Rose shouted after him, time and again, but he persisted with his search. He looked in the lounge, went through to the kitchen, then quickly returned to Rose's room, demanding, "Where is she?", his hearts pounding, the panic rising. "For God's sake, where is she?"

"Doctor!!" Rose hazarded another time, grabbing him _en route_ to the bathroom and staring him straight in the eyes. She waited until she had his full attention, before she whispered, "She's not here."

Her fingers were not so much gripping his arms, but stroking them, as she tried to not only instil some comfort in him, but in herself, too, and the Doctor knew that he should have stopped for a moment and given her a hug, then told Jackie that this wasn't her fault, and thanked Mickey for his concern, but he was too far gone for civility. He tore out of the flat again at a running pace and was charging up the stairs toward the roof before anyone could stop him. He heard Rose's voice behind him, trying to ground him, and bring him back from the edge, but it was to no avail.

He came to an abrupt halt as he bolted out onto the roof and turned around several times on the spot before he was satisfied that his beloved TARDIS had also gone. "No…" he murmured to himself. "No, no, no, no, NO!"

Rose was with him seconds later and halted his ravings by seizing him from behind and swinging him about to face her. "Doctor!" she yelled once more, looking into his wide eyes again until she knew she'd gotten his attention.

He breathed heavily for several moments, still catching his breath from his long cycle ride, until he rasped in a hoarse tone, "They've gone… both of them. They've gone."

He tried to swallow, but it was painful, a great knot having built up in his throat.

"Where've they gone?" Rose asked, hoping he knew the answer. "Where's the TARDIS? What's Hope done?"

The Doctor stared at Rose for a long time, putting off the inevitable answer for as long as he could until, with a slow but definitive arch of his neck, he turned his head to the skies and stared into the belly of the Daleks' mother ship.

Rose's grip turned rigid and she held onto him tight. "No…" she gasped in denial. "She wouldn't, she--"

"She would," the Doctor stated. "She's my girl."

Their eyes lowered to look into one another's again before, both sensing an intrusion of their privacy, they turned left to see Mickey and Jackie stood there, glancing between them.

"Would someone mind telling us what's going on?" Mickey asked, the axe hanging limp in his hands.

The Doctor looked from him across to Jackie and saw his would-be mother-in-law in a frame of mind he'd never dreamed possible; her empty eyes rose to meet his and she shook her head in utter shame. "I'm so sorry," she murmured. "I couldn't stop her, I just…"

Rose left the Doctor's side to go across to her mother and give her a much needed hug, whilst the Doctor just shoved his hands into his pockets and turned away, wondering how things had gone awry so quickly. He could feel his control of the situation slipping with each passing second, leaving fewer and fewer paths of resolution open to him, and he didn't know what to do about it.

"So, what now, Doctor?"

He glanced up as Mickey interrupted his reverie, the young man now stood right next to him, and saw in his eyes the usual mix of envy and aversion.

"Do you think you can save us this time?" Mickey continued.

The Doctor straightened up, daring Mickey to contradict him. "Have I ever let you down?" he asked, perhaps a little imprudently.

Mickey managed to hold his ground, staring directly back at the Time Lord. "Not me, no," he resolved. "But Rose… you let her down. For six years."

"That wasn't my fault."

"What wasn't? The kid, or the six years?"

The Doctor's brow knotted and he gave Mickey a harsh glare, but could think of no reply.

Mickey nodded, as if he'd expected such a response. "Rose deserves better."

"I didn't ask for this to happen," the Doctor asserted cuttingly. "It just did."

Mickey just made another bleak nod. "That's exactly what Rose said - but what happens next, eh? You save the world and then what? Are you gonna stick around, or keep running?"

The Doctor opened his mouth to reply, but he was cut off by the deafening sound of thrashing propellers. He turned to see a massive military helicopter thrust itself above the edge of the block of flats, and then just hover there, sending a huge gust of wind across the roof, which everyone did their best to brace.

"Don't tell me…" the Doctor groaned, squinting as he tried to make out whether it was exactly who he thought it was in the cockpit…

And his query was soon answered as the man he had in mind jumped down from the craft with his trademark audacity. He had a massive machine gun slung across his body, and sauntered over the roof as if there was nothing amiss.

"Captain Jack Harkness," the Doctor muttered.

Jack marched over, giving everyone a jolly wave. "Hi," he shouted above the noise. "I wondered if you guys wanted a lift?"

Rose and Jackie were staring, dumbfound, whilst Mickey looked as though he had never expected anything less from a man like Captain Jack. The Doctor, meanwhile, just looked thoughtful, as though something about this mildly irked him.

"How'd you do that?" he asked over the noise. "Manage to arrive at just the right moment? It's sorta clichéd."

Jack gaped and gave him a look of disbelief. "Does it matter? Are you coming or not? Dwight and I can't hang around here forever."

"_Dwight_?" the Doctor rejoined, before regretting doing so as Jack pointed out the man piloting the craft, and waved at him. Dwight waved back.

The Doctor might have rolled his eyes had the situation not been so desperate, but he resisted the urge and gestured for Rose to join him. She quickly came running, leaving her dumbfound mother and Mickey behind, and he then turned to give Mickey one final glance before following Jack and Rose into the craft. He didn't forget the look he saw on Mickey's face, though - _'They deserve the best,' _it had said,_ 'Don't forget that.'_

* * *

"So, where're we heading, Doc'?" Jack asked loudly, sitting in the seat next to the pilot whilst the Doctor and Rose were thrown back into the seats behind as the helicopter lurched up and away.

"The Dalek mother ship," the Doctor instantly replied.

He knew that he shouldn't have been surprised to see Jack grin at that, but he was. "Yes sir!" the Captain affirmed, before turning to Dwight to give him directions, whilst Rose merely looked over at the Doctor and smiled weakly. He caught her eyes and they stared at one another for a while, saying nothing, until he reached his hand out toward her, and she took it, clutching it tightly.

"You look uneasy," she said to him.

He nodded. "I am."

"Why?"

The Doctor's eyes picked out Jack. "Something's just not right. I knew he had… 'friends' in high places, if you will, but this is kinda pushing it."

"What, the helicopter?"

"No, the knowing we'd need him right now, the knowing we'd be here and not somewhere else… everything. It's as if he's had access to something I'd rather not think about."

Rose looked confused. "You sure you're not just paranoid?"

"After all I've ever been through, I have free license to be paranoid."

Rose couldn't disagree with that, and she smirked at him, before she leant forward over Jack's seat and asked, "How'd you get the helicopter, Jack?"

Jack shot her a know-it-all grin. "Well, I have friends in high places, you know."

Rose resisted a glance back at the Doctor. She knew he was wearing his 'I told you so' face. "No, I don't know," she continued. "Tell me more."

"Sorry girl, I can't. It's top secret."

"Top secret?" Rose questioned. "Have you been keeping things from us, Mr. Harkness?"

"Captain," he reminded her. "You don't think I've been on earth for six years and done nothing, d'you?" He chuckled. "You should know me better by now."

Rose was still confused as she sat back again with the Doctor, and begged him, with her puzzled expression, to pick up the enquiry from where she left off, but he didn't. He had always had suspicions about Jack Harkness, but for now, he trusted him, and was much more concerned about his daughter's welfare than of Jack's honesty or covert ventures.

"I guess we should be grateful," Rose resolved at length, and he could only agree.

Everyone remained silent for the rest of the flight as they continued to rise higher and higher into the sky, heading for the gigantic Dalek mother ship. When they reached it, Dwight proved himself to be both a skilled pilot and an extremely daring man, managing to bring the helicopter in heart-stoppingly close to the ship's hull, from where the three time travellers had to then pray for the best and leap out of the craft onto the metallic surface below.

Jack didn't even have time to wave Dwight goodbye as they all landed and began sliding down the ship's exterior, groping for a hold, whilst trying to put out of their minds the small fact they were thousands of feet up in the air!

The Doctor managed to find a grip first, and Rose and Jack soon joined him, after which he led them across the blustery exterior and down into one of the many open shafts, which were conveniently large enough for them to stoop in. (They also didn't require the use of the sonic screwdriver to get access to, which was fortunate.) It was unclear as to whether these shafts were ventilation ducts, or exhaust pipes, or something else entirely, but it didn't matter; the important thing was that they were inside, and it was from here that the trio would begin their steady infiltration of the great Dalek armada, like ants creeping into a termite nest.

Whether or not Dwight managed to get away safely after his heroic feat remained unknown.

* * *

By now, Rose had had quite enough excitement for one day, but she knew that the journey was no where near over yet. She quite wondered how the Doctor knew for certain that Hope and the TARDIS were here, but she didn't question his judgement; he had an uncanny natural intuition when it came to these sorts of things. It did appear, though the Doctor had said nothing to confirm it, that Hope had taken his sonic screwdriver on top of going AWOL, which made the state of affairs seem even more curious. It was as if Hope and the TARDIS and joined forces and decided to take on the might of the Dalek invasion all alone…

Rose wished she could understand this situation better, and felt as though she had somehow, as a mother, let Hope down. But what else could have been done to safeguard the child? It had been beyond her ability, and her comprehension. Even the Doctor seemed to have been pushed to the limit, caught utterly off guard by his prodigious daughter.

Rose looked ahead to the Doctor as they all continued to amble down the exhaust tunnel, stooped over like hunchbacks. She was unable to see his face, since his back was turned to her, but she believed him to be as on edge as she was. She thought about taking his hand, but since it was hard enough to walk through this duct as it was, she decided not to.

The tunnel they were in was less than five feet in circumference, which meant that none of them could stand up straight, so they were forced to scuttle along in a rather uncomfortable manner. Both Rose and Jack were following the Doctor since they had no idea where they were headed. He had an extraordinary sense of direction, and they were almost led to believe that he had done this before as he guided them left, then right, up through a hatch, across a viaduct, into another exhaust tunnel, and so on and so forth, until they were quite disorientated; they just hoped that he could remember the way back, because they certainly couldn't.

Their journey continued in this manner until they stopped beneath a hatchway, which led up into a large hallway, currently over their heads. Once the Doctor had ascertained that the area above was well and truly clear, Jack dislodged the metal grille which separated them from the space above, and the three of them then pulled themselves up through the cavity. They were now exposed, stood out in the open, and playing in Dalek territory.

"Well, that was… different," Rose murmured when she thought it safe, and tried to tidy her windswept hair, which kept falling in her face.

"Tell me about it," Jack concurred. "I'm thinking a ball of string would have done us well before entering the labyrinth, don'cha say, Doc'?"

The Doctor ignored him. If truth be told, he was feeling rather lost without his sonic screwdriver, but he had done without it before, and he would have to do so again. He straightened his jacket, rolled back his shoulders, and glanced either way down the large corridor. The place was bristling with typical Dalek design, just as he expected, and the telltale hum of the ship's engine could be heard pulsating up through the floors and out of the walls. These were the images and sounds that haunted his nightmares, and it made him tense, though he hoped this didn't show.

Brushing this all to the back of his mind, he looked back to Rose and Jack and said, "Are you ready?"

They each nodded in turn.

"Right. Let's go."

**TBC…**


	19. Biomass Of A Time Lord

**Part 19 - Biomass Of A Time Lord**

Rose had expected there to be Daleks everywhere, but there wasn't. She knew that many thousands of them were down on the planet surface, assaulting the populace whilst searching for the Doctor and his daughter, which might go some way to explain the stillness onboard, but still - this seemed unnatural.

She almost rebuked herself for her gullibility, though, as the Doctor led her and Jack into the main chamber of the ship, the place where this blasted adventure had begun, and she beheld swarms of Daleks everywhere in sight, crowding round their almighty Emperor.

"Shit," she gasped, summing up the moment for everyone as they peered over the ledge and stared down at the scene, finding themselves high up, on an upper level, which bordered the chamber.

Things only got worse when they all spied at the same moment the Doctor's familiar blue box, stood alone amidst the sea of Dalek shells, its head peering just above the surface as if it were striving not to drown.

"There's the TARDIS!" Rose exclaimed in a loud whisper, pointing at it from their vantage point.

The Doctor gently pushed her arm down and nodded. "Yes, I can see her," he said, though his eyes continued to trace every nook and cranny of the room, as if he were still looking for something. And he was.

Jack heaved a deep sigh and turned back to the party, looking edgy. "This isn't going to be easy," he murmured.

The Doctor's brow rose as he gave Jack the _'no shit, Sherlock'_ look. "Thanks for that expert analysis of the situation, Captain. Now, can we focus, please."

"How did Hope do this?" Rose muttered, rubbing her hands together over and over again in what could only be a nervous gesture. "How did she fly the TARDIS up here? How did she know what she was doing? How did she even _get in_? How --?"

She silenced as the Doctor's hand slid gently over her mouth and he stared deeply into her brown eyes, urging her to calm down with his serene, azure gaze. "It doesn't matter," he insisted quietly, his hand moving round to stroke her cheek, "not right now."

Rose swallowed and nodded. He was right, of course.

They all turned back to look upon the scenario once again and now attempted to arrive at some possible conclusion as to what to do. There was a clear pathway down from their level onto the lower floor, but this still left quite a distance between them and the TARDIS, stood in the Emperor's shadow. And this distance was filled every inch of the way with Dalek soldiers.

"Anyone got a grenade?" Jack asked.

The Doctor gave him a sideward glance. "I vote we throw you down there."

Jack looked mildly offended. "Why, thanks, Doc' - but I'll only roll down if you roll with me."

"Hands off," Rose intervened, before they all reverted to a more serious state of mind; but all possibility of thinking coherently was cast aside as the TARDIS doors opened and a little girl stepped out of the door…

The Doctor, Rose and Jack all gaped down in horror as Hope stood there, outside of the TARDIS, in the shadow of the Dalek Emperor and surrounded by hundreds of attentive Daleks.

This wasn't even the worst of it, though, for her entire person seemed to be _glowing_…

"What's she done?" the Doctor blurted out in shock, his emotions straddling the line between anger and frenzy. "What the Hell's she gone and done?"

Rose and Jack said nothing, though, for they were just utterly captivated by the form of this little goddess as she made a stand against a creature that claimed to be 'the God of all Daleks'.

The Dalek Emperor, meanwhile, was studying Hope meticulously, absorbing the fact that, though this wasn't the Doctor, the only man he ever expected to have the daring to fly straight into his grasps for a second time, this was something potentially greater.

"My brethren," he announced at length, his voice booming through the chamber like a clout of thunder. "Our search is over. Victory has walked into our hands in the form of this child. And this child shall in turn beget our future generations - our master race!"

The crowd of Daleks made a noise which must have been akin to cheering, but it was such a terrible, grating sound, that the Doctor and his companions had to cover their ears.

It was as this cheer subsided, and the Emperor continued to waffle on about his glorious future, that a sudden look of horror fell over the Doctor's features like a cloud passing over the sun; all the pieces of the jigsaw had suddenly fallen into place, and he now realised exactly what the Emperor had in mind.

"What is it?" Rose asked, reading his expression as if it had been words on a page.

He looked at her, his eyes wide and glassy. "The biomass of a Time Lord," he murmured. "They've realised what they need now, what they should have thought of in the first place." A terrible rage surged through his body and, with a growl at his own ineptitude, he flung a fist into the nearest wall. "Why didn't I think of this before?" he cursed, "They don't just want to kill us, they want to breed a race of Daleks from the genes of the Time Lords! Just imagine the consequences if they succeed…"

"But how will that make them stronger?" Jack challenged.

"Yes, Doctor," Rose agreed. "How?"

The Doctor looked between them, then at Rose in particular. "Think back to Utah, beneath the desert. What brought that Dalek back to life, Rose?"

Rose involuntarily flexed her fingers and looked at her palm. "My touch…"

The ensuing silence hung heavily in the air as Rose slowly came into sync with the Doctor's wavelength. "The biomass of a time traveller," she finally whispered.

The Doctor nodded. "Yup. Now think of the biomass of a Time Lord. Think of the potential. Time has been in our blood since Omega left the pathways open to us centuries ago."

"Look Doc', I've been thinking," Jack intervened. "You said these Daleks get time sick, and all that jazz, but didn't you fight them in a _Time_ War? Didn't they travel through time before?"

"Yeah. They did. They were very good at it once, but they messed up, and then lost all their stock in the war. Don't you remember what the Emperor said? That they've rebuilt their numbers by using human cells? And humans don't travel through time, as a general rule."

"But I'm fine," Rose said. "I've always been fine."

"You're a full human. They're nurtured their new generations of Daleks from a single one of your cells. There's a difference. They haven't had the time to refine their techniques. They've done the best they can with what resources they have, and in as little time as possible, but it hasn't been enough. Think about your genetic experiments in the twentieth century, and how weak your clones were."

Rose frowned. "What, like Dolly the Sheep?"

Jack stifled a laugh despite the moment. The Doctor glared at him. "Sorry," he murmured.

The Doctor ignored him and continued. "So what if the Daleks incorporate the cells of their greatest enemies into their breeding programme? Maybe, just maybe they'll return to their former glory - just _maybe _they'll have the key to domination of the universe. Perhaps they'll get time travel right."

Rose shook her head. "From just two of you? How will they do it?"

The Doctor looked at her hard. "They'll pulp, sift and mutilate our bodies until they have the material they need to breed another generation of efficient, time-travelling Daleks."

Jack looked so wound up by this that he was likely to snap at any second. "That's sick," he snarled. "Why would they want to use you, anyway? You're the enemy."

"It's as much about revenge as anything else," the Doctor murmured.

"Then let's save the poor kid and blow these jerks to kingdom come."

"No," the Doctor stated without question, looking down over the ledge toward the inert form of his child. "We can't just barge in."

"Well I hate to say it," Jack countered, gun at the ready, "but we don't have many cards left to play right now."

The Doctor's lips tightened and he glowered at the man. "When will you learn to trust me?"

Jack cocked an eyebrow. "How about when _you_ learn to trust _me_?"

"Enough," Rose hissed. "This isn't helping! We're wasting time!"

"Ironic, that," Jack murmured.

"That's my daughter out there," the Doctor growled. "Do you really think I'm going to be any less eager than you to save her?"

Jack glared back, but opted not to respond. It was all too clear that the situation was getting to everyone, and he wasn't interested in taking things any further, so he simply rolled back his shoulders and resigned himself to defeat.

The Doctor nodded at this. "Exactly," he barked. "So shut up and listen."

"Doctor!"

He turned at Rose's cry, and his eyes transfixed themselves on Hope once again.

"What's happening?" Rose asked.

The Doctor wasn't entirely sure, and he leant forward to get a better look as Hope walked slowly across the floor, carrying herself with all the confidence and self-conviction of a queen, and made her way toward the Emperor. Her whole person seemed to smoulder with an unearthly fire, a fire which the Doctor knew only his TARDIS could have bestowed upon her.

"What's wrong with her?" Rose asked desperately, grabbing his arm and giving it an urgent shake. "Doctor, please tell me!"

"She's looked into the Time Vortex," he explained, eyes refusing to leave the vision of his child, powerful and half-possessed. "No one's meant to see that…"

"Well someone has now, Doc'," Jack plainly stated, bringing everyone back down to earth in the same breath, "so how do we gonna deal with it?"

"_Intruder alert!"_

The three of them wheeled about in horror as they heard the terrible cry of a Dalek directly behind them, and then found themselves cornered by three of the golden monstrosities. They each shared a mortified glance with one another before they raised their hands above their heads, and faced the fact that their game was up. There was no TARDIS force field to save the this time…

"_Shit_," Jack growled, needing to say it out loud.

"Quite," the Doctor agreed.

* * *

And so it came down to this - back to the beginning. It felt like it had only been a mere five seconds since the Doctor had last stood before the Dalek Emperor and bargained for Rose and Jack's lives the first time round; now he was stood beneath that imperious, Cyclopic glare once more, with the lives of his comrades again on his hands, but, to make matters worse, his daughter now counted amongst them, an innocent little girl who had somehow allowed herself to become part of this terrible dilemma, and who was currently half-possessed by the burning energy of the Time Vortex. And it was all because of him…

"So, Doctor, we meet again," the Emperor chortled as the Doctor and his entourage were led through the crowd of dusky-gold brethren to stand before him. "And, this time, there will be no escape."

The Doctor glared, eyebrows rising as if begging to differ. "You think?"

"We again have your TARDIS. It conveniently came right into our grasps, as did the small Time Lord within it."

"She's not a pure Time Lord."

The Emperor seemed to consider this for a moment before he uttered, "It matters not. She has two hearts. The correct genetics are still present within her body, be she hybrid or no."

"She's just a child."

"That makes no difference."

The Doctor took a lunging step forward. "It makes all the difference!!" he yelled.

Several laser arms arced up, ready to strike him down, but the Emperor did not give the signal. He just studied him for several long, lingering moments before saying, "You know why we have continued to seek you, don't you, Doctor? And seek her?"

The Doctor glanced briefly at Hope, seeing her just standing there like a lifeless statue. "Yeah," he replied, "so we can be the foundation stock of your 'new race', right?"

The Emperor's huge, pink eye blinked at him. "In a manner of speaking."

"Daleks so efficient at travelling through time that they won't give it a second thought? Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer you as you are - great, clumsy, space dustbins."

The Emperor permitted himself a deep, dark laugh, barely taking heed of the Doctor's words. "It seems ironic that this child has dropped herself, and your time machine, straight into our grasps, doesn't it? I was rather hoping for a long and bitter war like our last one. Do you remember the battles we had, Doctor? Do you recall our great triumphs and glories? And your losses?"

The Doctor swallowed hard, trying to push the memories away. "I don't need reminding, _your highness_."

"No, I imagine not," the Emperor agreed. "Especially since the best of your race were wiped out in that conflict, and only the coward survived." He chuckled another time, before continuing, "But there will be no war this time, just petty destruction. We will destroy the last TARDIS in the universe and the last Time Lords along with it."

"No, you will not."

For the first time, Hope had spoken, and the Doctor turned in amazement as he heard the profound and mystical voice of his child, wrapped up in the surging power of the vortex, emerge from her tiny mouth.

The Emperor laughed again, but far more enthusiastically, as if he found this all very amusing. "The child speaks! And what a voice she has!"

The Doctor turned back. "Leave her out of this. This isn't her war."

"It was her war from the moment she was born. She is a Time Lord."

"Not wholly!"

The Emperor's gaze tightened on the Doctor a fraction. "But Time Lord enough…"

He then studied the Doctor and the girl for a moment longer until it struck him as to their similarities. "Can it be?" he murmured. "It must be… She is your spawn."

Rose cringed at the Emperor's crude language, which seemed, in the same breath, to cast down Hope as if she were filth. The Doctor meanwhile pondered on whether or not it was worth keeping this Emperor talking, though he had no alternative measures to take right now, even if he wanted to. He looked across at Hope, who still had not moved a fraction, as if she were also considering her options, and he prayed that she might, at least, have a trick or two left up her sleeve… With the vortex thundering through her tiny frame, her opportunities were limitless.

"So how far will you go this time to save those you love, Time Lord?" the Emperor now quizzed, bringing the Doctor's attention immediately back to the situation at hand.

He deep frown creased his brow. "What's that supposed to mean?" he shot back.

"Kill the child."

The Doctor felt the colour drain from his face as the Emperor uttered this command, caught totally unawares, and his hearts each made a cold pop. The Emperor wouldn't order Hope killed - he needed her! Or did he? Did he now believe that a hybrid was of no use? Had he decided to use only him, the 'real deal'? Would he really kill his child…?

None of it mattered… The Doctor just felt that deep-seated paternal instinct rise within him, the impulse to protect his child, and his legs shifted of their own accord, as did his arms, moving to drive him on and interfere with the threatened attack; but he was beaten to it…

He felt Rose surge past him and she was in front of him in a matter of moments. He heard himself cry out in vain, watching helplessly as she tore on ahead, but it all happened too fast, and he couldn't stop her, nor could he, this time, overtake her. All he could do was fear the worst, and remember that day long ago when, miles beneath the desert, the question had been put to him, _'What use are emotions if you will not save the woman you love?'_

**TBC…**


	20. The Time Vortex

**Notes:** This scene has been in my head for months, but penning (or rather typing) it has proved very difficult. I hope it comes across as well as I envisaged, or even half as well. I don't think I gave the Emperor enough time but, all things considered, he didn't have much of a part in the actual series, either, so I won't lose sleep over it. :) It's the Doctor's drama we want to see, after all. Some of it will sound very familiar.

* * *

**Part 20 - The Time Vortex**

The Doctor yelled after Rose, his stomach gripped by a knot of terror, and strove to propel himself faster across the floor with heavy drives of his arms, desperate to reach both Rose and Hope in time; but it was not to be. He saw a Dalek's laser arm rise from out of the corner of his eye, just on that terrible periphery of vision where all those things you'd rather not see were captured, and could do nought but watch in a helpless stupor as Rose was hit with the tremendous thud of a death ray. She shrieked before she dropped lifeless to the floor.

Everything then seemed to go silent, as if all other sound in the room had been drawn out into a vacuum, leaving nothing but the Doctor's footsteps echoing against the floor whilst he skidded to a halt by Rose's side.

The Doctor heard Jack's scream, but it barely registered since he was utterly overwhelmed by the horror of Rose's lifeless body, laid motionless beneath him. The knot in his stomach threatened to snap, his chest throbbed, his throat ached, and he fell to his knees by Rose's side.

"No…" he murmured, the words but a whisper as he shakily extended his hands toward her and gathered her up into an embrace. He cradled her there for some time, running his fingers over her face and down her neck, breathing unsteadily all the while; she was so cold, as if she had not been alive but thirty seconds before…

The Doctor found that he couldn't speak. There wasn't a word in any language he knew that was worth saying right now, not one that could articulate such pain, loss or disbelief. He simply brought Rose's head up closer to his and rested his nose over the dip below her forehead, where her eyes were now firmly locked shut. His fingers sought for a grip in her hair, and he clutched the golden locks as if they were something so precious, he couldn't possibly let them go. In truth, he just couldn't bare to take any of this in.

"I'm sorry," was all he eventually found it possible to say, and he buried his nose in her blonde locks as tears rolled down his face and his body shook. "This is all my fault."

Jack hovered uneasily in the background as he witnessed this small scene, his eyes transfixed by the form of the Doctor, sat hunched over the young, human woman who had redeemed him, brought him back from the edge, and in many ways saved his life. The fact that they were all surrounded by myriads of Daleks didn't matter, nor that these Daleks were closing in on them - all that registered was the tragedy in the centre of the room.

It was only after this small moment had passed that the Doctor felt the anger kick in. A red haze of rage fell over his vision and his eyes rose from their hiding place, buried in Rose's hair, to look upon the child at the centre of this whole fiasco. Hope stared back at him as if nothing had happened, her visage at complete peace with herself, and a faint smile playing upon her lips.

"Everything has its time and everything dies," she murmured.

The Doctor felt his own lips tremble in contempt, his own words thrown back at him, and he gently lay Rose down on the floor before he got unsteadily to his feet and glared at the girl. Suddenly, all blame converged on this little creature that he had created, this audacious and foolish infant for which he suddenly felt little or no compassion. His dark side engulfed him once again, the tragedies of the Time War, and the mass murder he'd been forced to deliver to his own race returning to haunt him and threaten to push him over the edge, on to revenge.

"What have you done?" he demanded in clipped tones, his fingers flexing at the end of his rigid arms.

Hope just stared back, replying with nought but the faint and grating smile that still hovered over her lips, as if this was all somehow to her amusement.

"Hope, your mother!" the Doctor roared, pointing. "She's dead!"

"It doesn't matter."

The Doctor's eyes flashed. He could hear Jack yelling at him from behind, no doubt telling him to calm down, but it was no use. He wasn't listening.

"How dare you?" he growled. "How can you say such a thing?"

"Everything has its time and everything dies. You know this."

"Enough!" he yelled. "Just stop this! Stop it now!"

Hope laughed, a terrible, little laugh of disdain. "You can't make me. You are _nothing_!"

The Doctor's chest rose and fell as he inhaled deeply, realising, with horror, that she was right. He was powerless.

Behind him, that grotesque monolith that was the Dalek Emperor revelled in Hope's verbal assault and guffawed terribly, his monstrous laugh cutting the Doctor to the quick. "How fitting," he gloated. "The child rises to cast the father down in flames. What a wonderful thing she is!"

Hope ignored this, however, and remained focused on the Doctor, staring him straight into the eyes. The glowing vortex of time swirled in the empty pits of her pupils, making her stare seem something quite eerie. "I looked into the TARDIS," she revealed, as if proud of her achievement. "And the TARDIS looked into me."

The Doctor swallowed, the angry haze giving way a little to rationale as each battled for control of his mind; but the conflict was far from won, and his ire still boiled hotly deep within. He glanced briefly at the TARDIS, his ship clearly a willing accomplice in all this, before he returned his focus to Hope. "You've looked into the Time Vortex," he stated, his face strained, his pupils constricted, "Don't you understand? No one's meant to see that!"

Hope again said nothing, but her creepy smile became only more prominent, infuriating her already frenzied father.

"And what was this meant to achieve, Hope?" the Doctor continued. "What were you planning to do?" He then laughed, his words as cold and cutting as an icy gale. "Look around you! Look at the mess we're in! Surrounded by Daleks, your mother _dead_!"

The Doctor's final word, weighted down by a leaden grief and resentment, seemed to finally pierce the ghostly shell within which Hope was cocooned, and her eyes darted toward her mother's corpse, as if seeing it for the first time, before she asked plainly, "Dead?"

"Yes," the Doctor went on, "Dead because of _you_!" He heard another protest from Jack, some kind of drabble along the lines of 'go easy on her', but he didn't want to hear it; he didn't have time for compassion right now. During the Time War, he had practically been stripped of such nuances, and this moment threatened to return him once again to that mindset.

"No," Hope countered in denial, staring back at the Doctor with his own blue eyes. "It's not true."

"You can't deny it," he blustered on, another tear rolling down his face. "You brought us here--"

"No, you brought yourselves here. There was no obligation."

"Obligation?" The Doctor laughed spitefully. "We're your parents! Of course there was an obligation!"

"It is not my fault. It was hers."

The Doctor went silent as he tried to comprehend this terrible, bland monster that his child had become; this creature that the Time Vortex had warped her into. Even though he knew it was hardly his child speaking from those lips, and that her true self was somewhere deep within, possibly fighting for space in a mind that was overcrowded by an all-powerful force, he couldn't find the will to forgive her, or to help her. It was these character flaws, these fractured parts of his person, that Rose had striven so hard to mend, to kiss better little by little - and now all that work was falling to pieces because of a child they had allowed themselves to engender. They were being torn apart by their own flesh and blood, a tragedy common to the lives of parents throughout the universe, though not on a scale such as this.

"It's her fault?" the Doctor queried, each syllable muted.

"Yes."

"For trying to save you? For giving up her life?"

"It is the truth."

"No! She is dead _because _of you!"

"No."

"Yes! You've killed your own mother!"

"NO!"

And it was then that Hope's true power manifested itself. Her eyes shone bright for a second, yellow light pouring out of them, before she extended a hand toward the Doctor and, in a threatening demonstration of power, sent him flying back along his own time stream.

Jack gaped in utter disbelief, and it would seem the Daleks along with him, as he witnessed the Doctor's features warp and change as he was sent back into his own past.

The Time Lord collapsed onto the floor, flailing and struggling, until he lay there with the body and face of his former regeneration. He then breathed heavily and looked at his child from out of different eyes, and with different perceptions. He knew what had happened, but he could barely comprehend it; and his body was in so much pain.

"I am the Bad Wolf," Hope announced, giving the words a sense of omnipotence.

The Doctor felt a further pang of shock penetrate him to his core at this; the words that had haunted both he and Rose throughout all their adventures, the curse that had overshadowed their every move and deed… it was her?

"The Bad Wolf?" he asked.

But, before he knew it, Hope was sending him reeling back from his eighth form into his seventh, dragging a scream of agony up from the depths of his soul. His body was one convulsing mass of pain, his every cell crying out in protest as they were forced to alter in the brief spell of but a second, reverting to a form they had long thought it impossible to regress to.

"Yes," Hope finally continued. "Traces of me are left throughout time and space, my precursors and successors, a message to lead you here; signs of what was transpiring until my form became physical, and until the Doctor became whole."

"Whole?" he asked, voice weak and feeble. He felt his frame tremble with another seizure as his child now sent him from his seventh form into his sixth, his dark hair weaving out into curly blond, his lines of age fading into a rounder and slightly more youthful countenance.

"Hope, please stop!" he pleaded in yet another voice, and another which for years had been alien to him.

"Yes, whole," Hope went on, ignoring his entreaty. "A man of feeling, of emotions and of purpose."

The Doctor was baffled, unable to take in either her words, or what she was doing to him.

"A true Time Lord," she elucidated, "with something to live for."

The Emperor Dalek began to tire of this show. "The Doctor must be kept alive!" he said. "Destroy this child, this abomination!"

It was a blatant signal for his troops to prepare themselves, and all the Daleks were suddenly on the alert, moving their laser arms into position; but Hope took no heed of any of this. The Doctor was of no threat to her, and she certainly wasn't perturbed by any number of Daleks.

"I control everything," divine-Hope proclaimed. "Every piece of time is mine to hold and to touch, to send forward or back. I control the great time stream, and its every tributary - including yours."

The Doctor braced himself as she caused his form to alter once more, the body of his sixth self giving way to the body before it, and a face that was even more youthful, and possessed of an uneasy manner. "Hope" he ventured again, the voice falling feeble on his dry lips. "Please, listen to me."

But his pleas fell on deaf ears. "I command the sun and moon," she continued. "The day and night!"

Another wave of pain coursed through the Doctor and he was in his fourth form, tall and bold, with a voice like thunder, yet all he could manage to utter was another cry of agony, wishing more than anything that the pain would stop, and that this whole extraordinary situation would just go away.

"My destiny is almost fulfilled," Hope ascertained. "And now but one task remains."

The Doctor swallowed, certain that whatever her destiny was, it could not turn out for the best. He was soon after thrown back into his third body, hair turning grey, face etched with lines, with a voice both genteel and refined.

"Hope," he barked at her sharply, finding his tongue, "you have to stop this. You have to stop this now!"

He managed to haul himself up onto his hands and knees, though his every movement caused further surges of pain to shoot through his limbs, but before he had chance to say more to his daughter, she hurled his body back yet another generation. He transformed into his second form, before collapsing onto the floor once more.

He heaved a deep breath, his substantially shorter legs struggling to find a footing as the hems of his jeans fell over them, and his leather jacket weighed him down. "You've got the entire vortex running through your head!" he warned her, the timbre of his voice again different. "You're going to burn!"

But she just sent him back one final time into the first of his many faces, the older man looking quite out of place in the get-up of his ninth regeneration. "Enough!" he demanded of the child. "No more, Hope! No more! This has to stop!"

Hope giggled as if this was all a game, and cast him back through his every generation until he returned to his present form, pale and sweating, hearts pounding, and every cell in his body whining in protest, ready to keel over and die.

"I can send you forward, too," she warned him, "I can do anything. Return every senior citizen to a foetus, every frog to a tadpole, every fossil to a living organism, and vice versa. I am the future and the past. I am time and tide."

'_What have you done, my TARDIS?' _was the question now at the forefront of the Doctor's mind as he tried once again to redeem Hope. "But this is all wrong!" he told her, struggling to regain his balance and return to his feet, though he did ultimately manage it. "These forces aren't ours to control!"

"Why not?"

The Doctor shook his head. Would nothing get through to this child? Would no words of reason crack the shell and reach the innocent five-year-old beneath?

"Doctor!" Jack yelled, finally rushing up toward him and turning his gun sight on the rapidly approaching Daleks. "We've got other problems to deal with here."

"Do you think I don't know that?" the Doctor snapped.

Jack didn't reply, but let out a volley of fire at the nearest line of Daleks, a vain attempt at holding them back, but his every bullet merely faded into the oblivion of their force-fields. "Shit, shit, shit…" he grumbled.

"Everything has its time," Hope continued to preach, "and your time--" Here she indicated the Daleks. "-- has come."

Her eyes turned on the Emperor Dalek and penetrated his person to the core, looking beyond his slimy, purple exterior into the haunting presence of the creature within, and somehow, this simple action made the Emperor very nervous indeed, as if she truly had penetrated him to the core. "Destroy her!" he crowed in a rising panic, unable to comprehend the power which this child currently possessed, and wanting rid of it. "Exterminate them all!"

The Doctor wheeled about one-hundred-and-eighty degrees as he heard a death ray come his way, and he faced it full-on, ready to die as it pelted toward him. He closed his eyes and waited for the pain and subsequent darkness… but it never came; opening his eyes again, he saw that the beam had stopped short, and was hovering mere centimetres from his chest, before it slowly began to retract back into the laser arm of the Dalek from whence it had come. The Doctor didn't need to turn around to know that this was Hope's doing.

"Do not fear, father," she said. "I shall protect you from the false god."

The Doctor exhaled, the brush with death too near, and wondered why Rose hadn't received the same kind of protection. Perhaps this was a Time Lord issue. He didn't have time to care, though, and swiftly turned around with Jack to watch Hope face-off with the lord of the Daleks.

"You cannot hurt me!" the Emperor arrogantly hollered at her, "I am immortal."

"You are tiny!" Hope retorted. "I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence, and I _divide _them!"

The Doctor jumped as he heard a strange explosive noise to his left and he watched as one of the Daleks began to decompose into golden atoms and fade into nothingness. Slowly but surely, every one of the others followed suit.

"My brethren!" the Emperor yelled, eye darting round in horror as he saw his every precious soldier disintegrate around him. "No!"

And he then looked down at Hope again, eye connecting with her face as he said, willing himself to believe it, "I will not die! I cannot _die_!" But soon he too was starting to fade away, the tips of his tentacles breaking up into golden globules, the arms then following, before his whole person and his gigantic metal exterior were also decaying into nothingness, and being cast across the wide expanse of time.

Jack gawped around himself in disbelief, turning this way and that as Dalek after Dalek disappeared, their confused cries being soaked up by the vortex of time, whilst the Doctor could do nothing but watch his young and tiny child do the impossible, and cast the Daleks into dust. It pained him to see it; it was such an act of vigour and exertion, which he knew would induce death in any normal person, be they human or alien, something which he refused to let happen to his little girl.

"Everything dies," Hope repeated one final time as the last of the Daleks faded away, and she then remained stood there, completely still, continuing to give off her golden glow.

The Doctor knew he had to act now. "Jack, take Rose, quickly. Into the TARDIS."

Jack hitched his gun over his shoulder and knelt by Rose's side, taking her cold body up into his arms before he said, "But what about you?"

The Doctor rounded on him, his visage pale but nevertheless filled with a steely determination. "Just do it!"

Jack swallowed in the face of the 'oncoming storm', and did as he was told, clutching Rose tightly and retreating into the Doctor's ship. This left the Doctor to confront Hope alone and do what he had to do. He slowly paced forward and looked down on his child with a feeling of fear in his hearts. "Okay, you've done it," he murmured to her, "Now you have to stop. You must stop!"

Hope didn't seem to hear him at first, but after a while, an unearthly voice emerged from her lips, a straggling whisper that was undoubtedly Hope's true self, struggling to break free from her trance. "I can't," she muttered.

"You must," the Doctor insisted. "Let go."

Hope again shook her head, but tears were now welling in her eyes as she cried out helplessly, "I can't!"

The Doctor felt his eyes well up in turn. He couldn't lose the mother and the daughter; it would destroy him.

He dropped to his knees and stared deep into her eyes, which, far from being their ordinary pale blue, continued to swirl and pulse with the bright light of the Time Vortex, taken over by its all-consuming power.

"Please let go," he implored.

"But I can do so much," Hope said. "I can bring life!" She rose her hands into the air beside her as if she were truly replenishing a deceased soul, but the Doctor knew, no matter how much the idea sometimes appealed to him, that this could not continue. "You can't do this, Hope," he said softly, "no one can control life and death."

"But I can!"

"You shouldn't!"

"I can do _anything_."

"Just let go, Hope, the power's too much - it'll destroy you!"

"But I can see _everything_." There was then a falter in Hope's face, a cringe as if in pain.

The Doctor was struggling with his temper again and trying to keep himself in check, but he was becoming desperate, and his child, as stubborn as he was, was refusing to give in.

"Hope please!" he begged. He had to help her quickly because the Dalek ship itself was now falling apart around them, breaking down into atoms like the Daleks that had recently populated it.

"I can see it all," Hope continued to tell him, as if she had to share the wonder of it with him and hope that he would understand why part of her wanted to retain this power. "All of time and space; all that is, all that was… everything."

"I see that too, Hope," the Doctor whispered, trying once more to get through to her, "but it's a curse as well as a blessing. It drives you mad."

Hope choked on her tears, seeming not to hear him. "But I can also see what will never be," she lamented. "What can never happen. What _will _never happen." She shook her head. "No, I don't want to know that!" And now she looked him straight in the eyes. "You can't die!"

The Doctor threw his arms around her and held her to him. Nothing mattered anymore except her, and she had to live. "Easy there," he whispered as he felt her body, like a hot iron, sear and tear at his already fractured soul. "Let go of it. Give it to your daddy."

"You can't go!"

He forced himself to ignore her. "Let it go. Let me take it away."

Hope was crying onto his shoulder now, tears that felt as though they were blazing through his leather jacket, and the Doctor ground his teeth together, trying to concentrate on alleviating his only child of all the pain and torment she had unwittingly inflicted upon herself.

As he clasped her to him and murmured soothing words to her, he indeed felt the vortex begin to seep along her tiny arms and, from where her hands clasped his neck, permeate through his skin and into his body. The entire vortex of time and space was entering his bloodstream and flowing round his veins, and soon, it would break him.

"Good girl," he whispered. The pain was incredible, but the girl in his arms was worth so much more than his life. He felt her small hands shift as she strove to hold onto him ever the more tightly as he proved to be the antidote to her suffering, and, soon enough, Hope's mind had cleared, and she felt relatively normal again… just incredibly tired.

The Doctor sighed as he felt Hope stoop against him, her strength ebbing and her body collapsing beneath the strain of what she'd just done. He turned his head to her and planted a kiss on her cheek; "Well done," he whispered before, his eyes catching hers for one final time, and his being the ones that were this time filled with the glowing vortex, she fainted in his grasp.

He closed his eyes and gathered his last reserves of strength to make it back onto his feet, needing his legs to bear his weight just a little longer as he carried his child across the floor and into the TARDIS.

"Doctor!" Jack cried as he stepped through the doorway.

The Doctor looked across at Jack and his face actually lit up, for he saw that Rose was alive! He couldn't believe it. "Rose…" he gasped.

Jack held onto Rose as she drowsily picked out the Doctor with her blurry eyes. "Doctor…?" she murmured before, events taking their toll, she blacked out again, and Jack lay her gently on the floor.

"She just woke up," Jack blurted, completely taken aback. "It's a miracle, Doctor!"

The Doctor looked down at his daughter knowingly and smiled again. "Maybe it is," he muttered, before he reminded himself that time was of the essence and he got to work.

"Jack, quick," he said, pacing towards the man and handing him his daughter. "Take her…"

Jack promptly took Hope from him whilst the Doctor put a good distance between them and stared up at the TARDIS. He gave her an admonishing look, one which promised long words were to be had later on, before he gave her console a kick, forcing a panel of it to open, into which he spewed the entirety of the vortex, finally emptying his body of the burden, and sending it reeling back into the heart of the TARDIS.

The glare of the vortex was so bright, Jack was forced to turn away, and even though Hope was currently unconscious, he shielded her eyes as well. When he finally found it safe to turn round again, he saw that the Doctor was busying himself getting the TARDIS into flight, making sure that they escaped the Dalek spaceship before it completely crumbled around them. It didn't take Jack long to notice though, as he studied the man carefully, that there was a real agony in his eyes, and that his body, having taken onboard and manipulated the entire Time Vortex, was very weak indeed.

"Are you okay, Doctor?" he dared to ask.

The Doctor made no reply, but the way he feebly tugged the levers and half-heartedly flicked the switches told Jack all he needed to know. He swallowed, wondering whether or not to continue to voice his fears, but one look at the Doctor's eyes told him not to bother, for they remained as sharp and focused as ever; the Doctor had done what he had had to do, and no one was to ask him any questions about it…

Once they were safely away from the fading Dalek ship, the Doctor at last stopped in his tracks and shared a significant look with Jack. Jack swallowed again, but said nothing in return.

Acknowledging this with a nod, the Doctor then stepped away from the console, and slowly walked round in Jack's direction, stopping in front of the Captain and stooping down to plant a farewell kiss on his daughter's forehead.

Jack felt his stomach churn at this, an ever-growing sensation of dread rising in his mind. "Doctor…" he sighed, unable to hold his silence any longer; but the Doctor only glanced at him and shook his head, asking him not to say a word.

Jack could thus only continue to watch as the man then knelt down by Rose's side and pressed a kiss to her lips, a kiss which said 'goodbye', before he returned to the TARDIS console, emitted a sigh, and pressed down on a button. He then took a few paces back.

"This is Emergency Programme Two," he said, staring straight ahead. "Now Rose, just listen…"

**TBC…**


	21. Life And Death

**Notes:** I kept listening to the Ten/Rose farewell scenes to pump up the sad emotional energy I needed to write these last few parts. Imagining all this with Nine when he has a child to leave behind, as well as a beloved companion, is quite something.

* * *

**Part 21 - Life and Death**

Jackie and Mickey looked up as they heard the sound of feet coming through the front door, and they rushed from the lounge into the hallway to see Jack charge in with a very pale Rose in his arms.

Jackie suppressed a shriek and threw her arms round her daughter, holding her tight, until she then set eyes upon the Doctor as he stumbled in next, carrying Hope, the child both unconscious and equally pallid.

Jackie let out another gasp. "What have you done?" she cried, "What in Christ's name have you done now?"

The Doctor's eyes were red and heavy with fatigue, and he could do nought but give Jackie a long, lingering stare. Once upon a time he would have told her that it was _she_ who had failed to keep his daughter safe, and that she was as incompetent an ape as the rest of her race, but he just wasn't that man any more. He thus walked past her without a word and went quickly into the lounge, where he lay his inert child across the sofa.

Jackie watched him go and then turned back to Rose, everyone's silence unnerving her. "Rose," she said, brushing her daughter's hair out of her eyes, whilst trying her best to hold back the tears. "What's happened, sweetheart? Have those aliens gone? Did they do this to you?"

Rose was disorientated and confused, but, like any caring mother, was more concerned about her daughter than anything else. "Is she all right?" she asked plainly. "Is Hope okay…?" She then swayed a little and passed out again against Jack.

Jack caught her and lifted her carefully into his arms. "She's had a rough time," he muttered.

Jackie bit her lip and nodded in response. "Come quick and get her into her room," she said, leading the Captain to Rose's room. Mickey followed them, too, and then both he and Jackie took over her care, whilst Jack took the opportunity to go quickly and check on the Doctor and Hope.

When the Captain walked into the lounge, he found the Doctor knelt on the floor beside his little girl. The man was very still and his posture seemed almost deathly. It was unnerving.

"Doctor?" he asked.

"There are a lot of injured people out there, Captain," the Doctor's tired voice replied. "They need your help."

"But what about you?"

The Doctor slowly rose his eyes and gave him a feeble smile. "I can handle this."

"You're not well."

"No, I'm not."

Jack sighed and glanced down at Hope. "Will she be okay?"

"Yeah. She'll be fine."

"Well… that's good."

There was a silence, until Jack attempted a smile and said, "I wish I'd never met you Doctor. I was much better off as a coward."

The Doctor gave him another limp smile and nodded. "Go back to your people, Captain. Help tidy up this mess. And goodbye."

Jack nodded, half of him wishing he could say more in what he knew was his final farewell to this man. "See you in Hell," he settled with, smirking jadedly, before he turned and slowly trudged away. He bid Jackie, Mickey and the unconscious Rose goodbye on his way out, then was gone.

Once Rose was comfortable, Jackie left her in Mickey's care, and came the Doctor's way, confronting him in the gloomy living room. She watched him as he sat there, huddled over Hope, stroking her brow with weak motions of his hand.

"They could have both died," she said.

The Doctor didn't lift his head. He only continued to stroke Hope's brow.

"When will you stop, Doctor?" Jackie continued. "Bringing all these alien threats here, and putting not just my daughter in danger, but your own, as well!"

The Doctor cringed, feeling a sharp pain building up inside of him whilst Jackie's voice grated on in the background.

"I'm talking to you, mister!" she ranted on, "Don't you ignore me!"

The Doctor felt his body convulse and he ground his teeth together, trying to keep the pain under control. He hadn't had the time to even get his head round what had happened, nor what it was he had done to save Hope, but it was all quickly catching up with him.

Jackie seemed oblivious to his plight, however, as she walked over in his direction, lowered herself by his side, and put her own hand to Hope's head. "She's got a temperature," she said with a sigh. "She's just like you, you know? Just goes walking off into danger, looking for trouble."

Her voice then paled as she felt a slight inkling of guilt filter into her mind again. "And I just couldn't stop her," she said, stroking Hope's face and clasping her little hand. "I said to Rose, before she was even born, that that Doctor of hers would make no child a good father, and look what's happened. My point's been proven."

But the Doctor made no reply; he was too preoccupied with what was happening inside his own body, and before Jackie even realised something was amiss, he had shot to his feet and stumbled backwards across the room, hurtling straight into the fireplace, where he knocked several ornaments astray. It was the smash as one hit the floor that finally got Jackie's attention.

"What are you--?" she began to shout until she looked at him properly and saw that he was in real agony. His face was white, sweat was pouring down his brow, and he was shaking so badly it frightened her.

She hesitated and took a step back rather than forwards. "Are you all right?" she asked.

The Doctor took several deep breaths before he managed to compose himself enough to say, "I'm dying, Jackie."

The breath caught in Jackie's throat as he said this and she didn't quite know what to do. She hazarded a faint laugh and said, "Don't be daft," trying to lighten the aura. "Come and sit down, I'll get you a drink of tea or something, and --"

"Oh, Jackie Tyler…" the Doctor interrupted, smiling despite himself, "so domestic, even now."

She quietened and was shaken a little as the man looked her straight in the eyes for once, and thus found herself saying, as if she knew she wouldn't have another chance, "I just want them safe, Doctor. I want to know that they're going to come home again. Maybe you don't know what that's like, or don't remember…"

"But don't you see, Jackie?" he countered, not breaking their stare for a second, "We're never safe. Not really. It doesn't matter whether you live day-in and day-out in a London suburb or you travel out to the fringes of the universe, you can never be certain of what's coming round that corner next. You might fall under a bus tomorrow or live to be a hundred - no one ever knows for sure. That's why we can't live our lives in fear, or try to prevent the mildly probable when there's so much more that's plain _possible_." He took a breather and closed his eyes as another surge of pain shot through his limbs. "That's what I've wanted to show Rose, Jackie. That life is for living. It's wasted on so many of you."

"Oh, you can say all that fancy stuff," Jackie returned tetchily, "but some of us live ordinary lives and are happy that way. I know Rose is besotted with you, but she's wasted a lot of time waiting for you to come back, raising this lovely little girl on her own, and when you finally do turn up, this is what happens. You've put all their lives in danger! People have died, half of London's burning, and I hate it - I hate never knowing whether you or Rose, or Hope, are ever going to come back again!"

He made a strained smirk, knowing that half of her words were very true. "Well, at least you won't have to worry about me much longer," he muttered. "I'm not going to be here."

"But you've got a daughter now!" Jackie protested. "You have a responsibility toward her. You can't just leave her to grow up without a father. Not like Rose had to."

The Doctor smiled weakly once more. "She'll have a father. Trust me."

"And what about Rose?"

He glanced downwards and sighed. "Jackie," he said at last. "Can you tell her…?"

Jackie watched as the man framed his mouth around the beginning of a word, but no sound emerged.

"What?" she asked, trying to urge him on with several steady nods.

The Doctor closed his mouth and rallied himself for another shot. "Tell her--" he whispered, but the words that should have followed fell silent on his tongue. He tried to force them out, but they just wouldn't come. He then jumped in surprise as he suddenly felt Jackie's hand on his arm, splintering his concentration.

She smiled at him and said, "I'll tell her."

The Doctor frowned, searching her eyes until he realised she understood him completely. He smiled in return, before he closed his eyes as a nauseating spasm traversed his frame, a sure-fire sign that his body was breaking from within. He then lowered himself to his daughter's side one last time and planted a farewell kiss on her brow, then got up and rushed out of the flat without a single look back.

He stumbled out of the door, hurtled down the colonnade, and found himself half running, half falling down the flights of steps, his unwieldy legs buckling beneath him and making him crash into the barriers and ricochet of the walls. Out of the door he ran, the pain overcoming him to such a point that he saw little but a storm of white dots littering his vision. He was thankful that he made it to his faithful TARDIS in time, the blessed cocoon in which he would shield himself until this slow and painful death had transpired, and yet another resurrection would begin.

The metal grating clattered as he rushed through the door and collapsed onto the floor, and he then finally allowed himself, in this private sanctum, where no one but his faithful ship could bear witness, to cry out in anguish. He curled his body into a ball and ground his teeth together again, willing the pain to stop as, slowly, his every cell gave up on him, and opened themselves up to that unique miracle of the Time Lords: regeneration.

**TBC…**


	22. Different Colours

**Notes:** Most of this has been written for ages. :) And I actually quite like it.

**

* * *

Part 22 - Different Colours**

Rose opened her eyes and squinted in the sunlight that was coursing through her window. It was so quiet, it was strange. Her mind at first was nothing but an empty void, but, the longer she lay there blinking into space, the more colours and images spread onto this blank canvas, and then suddenly it hit her like a bolt from the blue.

"Doctor!" she cried, leaping out of bed and charging into the hallway.

As she tore into the lounge she shuddered to a halt, seeing her mum knelt beside Hope, who was asleep on the sofa, whilst Jack and Mickey stood just behind her. They turned in her direction as she entered the room, their faces gloomy and grey.

Rose swallowed and rushed to her daughter's side, putting her hand to Hope's cheek. She was very hot. "She's burning up," she whispered, taking the damp flannel that her mum was holding and placing it across Hope's forehead. "What happened? Will she be okay?"

"She'll be fine," Jackie replied in that soothing motherly tone, the one which forewarned bad news, and thus put Rose on the alert.

She turned her eyes on her mother and stared at her. Jackie gave her a cheerless look in return, then cast her eyes down, telling Rose with this gesture all that she needed to know.

Rose shot to her feet. "Where is he?" she asked Jack, looking round the flat just in case she'd missed him. When she didn't get an answer, she fixed the Captain with a glare and demanded, "Jack, where _is_ he?"

Jack looked uneasy, as if he had seen things in the past few hours which had turned his world upside-down. "He's left you a message," he replied quietly. "It's in the TARDIS."

Rose didn't need to be told twice, and she was soon running out of the flat. She spied the TARDIS out on the forecourt below, so charged down the stairs and into the blue box as quickly as she could.

"_This is Emergency Programme Two,"_ the message began, beamed out of the lips of a holographic Doctor._ "Now Rose, just listen, because I don__'t have long left._

"_I won't be there when you wake up - I'm sorry about that, but there's no way I'll be able to hang on. At least our daughter is safe and unharmed, which is all that really matters in the end, isn't it?"_

He looked strange, and not just because he was a hologram, either; his face and his eyes, they were so lifeless, as if ever ounce of his strength and vitality had been drained from him.

"…_. I'm dying, Rose - there's nothing I can do to stop it. I absorbed all of the energy from the Time Vortex and no one's meant to do that. Hope would have burned from the inside out if I hadn't taken it from her - I made a choice and it was for her. And for you._

"_Don't give me that look, I know that you are. There was really nothing else I could do. And now… now I've gotta say goodbye. I won't see you again - not like this, with this daft old face; but Time Lord's have this trick, you see - something I never told you about. It's a way of cheating death, but it comes at a price. By the time you replay this message, there will be a different man in my shoes. Every cell in my body has to change. Just remember that deep down, I'll still be me. Every time it happens, I always come back the same, but different - same man, different colours - a blessing as well as a curse._

"_Before I go, I just want you to know that you were fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. And tell Hope… tell her she was fantastic, too, just like her mummy. Take care of her. And tell her daddy said goodbye._

"_Rose…_

"…

"_I…_

"_Oh, you know."_

And as the image faded, and Rose reached out to him, feeling the tears roll down her cheeks, she looked up to indeed see another man in the Doctor's shoes, a stranger who wore the Doctor's coat and the Doctor's jeans, but who wasn't the Doctor she knew at all. He held her eyes with his own, and seemed imbued with an aura that was both sad and unsure, but, even more than this, forlorn. It was as if he had lost something very dear, which he knew he would never be able to find again. And in many ways, he had.

**

* * *

**

Hope stirred slowly and groaned as she opened her eyes. She was back in her own bed now, in her mother's room, wearing her teddy bear pyjamas, and when her vision cleared, she saw that there was a man sat on the end of her bed. She quickly wiped her eyes and sat up.

Noticing movement out of the corner of his eye, the man turned to look at her and she saw that he was in her daddy's clothes. He was younger-looking than her father, with large brown eyes and longish, floppy hair, yet something told her he was no ordinary stranger; something about him was very familiar.

She stared at him for some time before she shifted along the bed on her hands and knees and then sat next to him. "Who are you?" she asked quietly.

He smiled and fished inside his jacket for a moment before he withdrew a small, brown paper bag. Hope watched it as it rustled in his hand, and he opened it. She then glanced up to his face again and saw that he was giving her a rather nice, wide smirk. He proffered the bag to her.

Hope gave it another suspicious look.

"Jelly baby?" he asked.

She stared into his brown, unfamiliar eyes and swallowed slowly before, with a little uncertainty, she dipped her hand into the bag and plucked out a fat, yellow sweet from within. She then placed the jelly baby in her mouth and slowly began to chew. It tasted nice.

"I like the yellow ones myself," the man said, closing his eyes and plunging his own hand into the bag. "What do you think I'll get?"

Hope was completely thrown, but found this all quite reassuring after what she'd been through, so replied with a smile. "Black!"

"Black, you say?" the man said with a shrug. "I think it'll be red."

He then pulled his hand quickly from the bag and, keeping the jelly baby hidden, placed his fist between himself and Hope. "Black you say?"

Hope nodded.

"And red say I?"

Hope smiled again and they then both looked down as he opened his fingers and revealed--

"Oh no."

Hope laughed. "You got a green one!"

She giggled another time as she then watched his face contort. "Ugh," he moaned. "Green's my least favourite."

"Mine too."

He shook his head and, with a sigh, said, "Ah well. Bottom's up!" and threw the jelly baby into his mouth. He chewed quickly and swallowed.

After a moment of bitterness, his visage then rearranged itself to be as placid as before and he again offered her the bag. Hope took another one, a pink baby this time, and met his eyes once more before she asked again "Who are you?" as the sweet went into her mouth.

"I'm the Doctor," he said, "And who are you?"

"Hope."

"Hope Tyler?"

"Yes."

"I thought so."

Hope stared at him for another moment. "Where's daddy?"

The Doctor - or the man who claimed he was the Doctor - took another jelly baby from his bag, an orange one, and tossed it into his mouth. "He's here," he said, tapping himself briefly on the chest. "Or part of him is."

Hope looked confused. "You're not my daddy."

He nodded and raised a finger in concurrence. "That is very true, but, then again, I am." He then suddenly froze and rather unceremoniously thrust a finger into his maw to remove part of a jelly baby that had gotten stuck in the roof of his mouth. Succeeding to dislodge it, he then swallowed the rest. "Sorry," he said after a cough, "It's these new teeth - can't seem to get the hang of them." He then realised what he'd done and added, "And don't you start doing that in front of your mother."

Hope made a gesture that promised she wouldn't.

"Well," the Doctor continued, "I'll try to explain. I'm a Time Lord, you see, and we have a way of cheating death. But when we do it, we have to change. Now me as I was before, the me who was your daddy, was dying, so I had to change, and here" - he pointed to himself with both hands "is the result. Have I confused you?"

Hope looked him up and down. "My daddy's dead, then?"

"Well, no. I'm your daddy, but still not _technically_ your daddy."

"Are you different on the inside as well as the outside?"

The Doctor pursed his lips and studied this remarkable young girl for a moment before he gave her an affirming nod. "Yes, I rather think I am."

"Then you're not my daddy."

"But I'm still the Doctor."

"No you're not."

"Yes I am."

They stared at one another until the Doctor's rustling bag of sweets broke the silence and he offered her another. Hope didn't take one. She was just so bewildered. She was being told that her father had changed into this man, and he claimed to still be the Doctor, yet the elements of him that had made him her father seemed to have altered, or changed, or just gone.

"I miss him," she whispered.

"I miss him, too, Hope," the Doctor whispered, "but there's nothing I can do about it. There are some things for which I can not turn back the clock." His face twitched slightly as he remembered how Hope had turned the clock back on him, but she seemed to have forgotten about that now, a memory faded, though perhaps not gone forever.

"Where's mummy?" Hope then asked.

The Doctor nodded behind him toward Rose's bed. "Asleep." He then put a finger to his lips. "Shh. Mustn't wake her. She's very tired."

"What does she think of you?"

The Doctor tapped his fingers against his lips and again stared long and hard at her. "She's confused, just like you are. It's difficult for her."

"Does she still love you?"

The Doctor sighed and looked away. "I don't know. I'm not the man I was, and I never will be. But there are elements of me that will never change." He glanced back at Hope. "You might understand this better if you were older, but listen now: there's this thing called a triangular prism - you ever heard of it?"

She shook her head.

"Well, it's a block of glass that can separate light into the seven colours of the spectrum - like when you see a rainbow, that's what a prism does. You with me?"

Hope looked bemused, but the Doctor persevered before he lost the plot himself. "You see, Hope, I'm like the light, separated by a prism into a spectrum; each time I regenerate, you just see another one of my colours, and though each is different, I still come from the same beam of light. You just see another facet of my soul."

"I don't understand."

He smiled and put his arm around her. "I know you don't," he said, giving her a quick kiss on top of her head, "but one day you will. I'm sure of it."

He then got to his feet and made for the door. "Now, get some sleep."

Hope did as she was told and clambered back beneath the covers. "Goodnight, Doctor."

The Doctor's eyes lingered on her as she said this, his hand resting on the door handle. He couldn't help but feel a pained twang in his hearts as he realised that this little girl failed to see any reason to call him 'daddy' any more. "Goodnight, little one," he replied. He left the bag of jelly babies on the side before he slipped out the door and was gone.

**TBC…**


	23. There's Still Hope

**Part 23 - There's Still Hope**

Hope was a special girl. No one really noticed it because she didn't seem so different from any other teenager, but she was, and she knew just how unique, too. In fact, she was very special. She had once seen things that weren't meant to be seen, images from the future and shadows of the past, and she'd carried the entire vortex of time inside her head, and survived. This had been ten years ago now, but it could have been yesterday, for so vividly did she remember it, as well as the man who had saved her life - her father, the Doctor. She still had visions that came to her from across time, flickers of things what would be, or what had been, but these visions weren't coming to her as often or as strongly as they used to. Her mother thought that she might have an idea why, but she never told Hope exactly what her theories were. Perhaps it was better that she didn't know.

It was Tuesday afternoon, another Tuesday very much like last Tuesday, and it must be noted that it wasn't particularly special in any way, but it was yet another Tuesday in Hope's life that would prove to be most significant. Hope knew this from the moment that her rather dormant sixth sense began to tingle at the back of mind during lunchtime, and as the day progressed, she became more and more excited about what this might mean.

My a quarter-to-three in the afternoon, she was in another History lesson with Mrs. Gaskin, and was spending another forty-five minutes hearing about the Black Death, the plague doctors, and the red crosses that were painted on people's doors. It was fascinating, but Hope's concentration wasn't there. She kept looking out of the window at the school yard, noticing the little details that other days she would take for granted - like the way the trees swayed in the wind, the way a crisp-packet rolled across the concrete, and the pure azure-blue colour of the cloudless sky. Something was afoot but she had no idea what it was, or why she was feeling this way.

The bell rang finally at the end of the lesson, as the clock read three-thirty, and the class disappeared swiftly out of the door. It was home time! The voices of myriads of children echoed and shrilled down the corridors, and desperate feet, eager to get home, pounded down the stairs, making for the exits. White shirts were un-tucked from trouser and skirt hems, blue-and-red ties were loosened from about shirt collars, and black blazers were thrown off and carried over shoulders as the mass of pupils took flight.

Hope, however, took things slowly, almost as if she might never see them again, picking up on every smile, every individual laugh, and every joke pulled on every unsuspecting victim. She waved goodbye to friends, hitched her backpack over her shoulder, and made her way out of the school gates toward the spot where her mum or Uncle Jack would usually be waiting to pick her up. As she turned the corner onto Petunia Grove, though, she stopped and sighed. The car - either her mum's or Jack's - was not there.

Hope pursed her lips and shrugged, taking another good look around just to make sure that she hadn't missed it, but there wasn't a familiar car in sight. She thus let her bag slip off her shoulder, and she perched her backside on the street sign, swinging one of her feet back and forth as she waited for the arrival of her escort.

In the meantime, she couldn't help but let her mind wander again, as it had been doing often throughout the day, and looked around the street. There was a blue tit on the hedge over the road, stood near a couple of sparrows and a robin. The front door of house number five was a brilliant shade of red, something which she had never really noticed before, and there was some graffiti on the road sign on the opposite side of the street. It read 'Bad' something or other, but she couldn't read the other word since it was blocked off by the blue box.

Hope blinked and slowly rose to her feet. It couldn't be…

She looked both ways, picked up her bag, and walked across the road to study the great, blue monolith which was stood the other side of the road, and wondered why she hadn't noticed it to begin with. Now that she saw it, it stuck out like a sore thumb!

She halted just short of it, looking up at the doorway: 'Police Public Call Box', it read. The wooden panelling was a bit worn, and the paint was clearly flaking in several places, but, in her eyes, it was one of the most beautiful things in the universe. She rather felt that she had never quite seen anything so precious.

She reached out to touch it and, as her fingers connected with the familiar ship, a thrill was sent through her. It was her father's genes within her, she was certain of it, reacting to this ancient Galifreyan artefact. To her, it felt like home, but even more than this, it felt like an old friend.

She smiled and walked all the way round the TARDIS, running her hand over the rough panels and taking in the texture and the feel of it as she went. "I missed you," she whispered to the ship, stroking it like a dearly beloved pet, before she leant against the wood and just listened. There wasn't any noise to be heard in particular as she pressed her ear to the box, but there was a silence outside the noise which was beautiful to her - a vacuum of sound that only her ears could appreciate, the sweeping essence of the TARDIS.

She stood there for some time, absorbing all that the TARDIS exterior could give her, before she gave the door a knock and walked right in.

It was just the same as ever. The huge control room yawned out before her, with its great domed roof held up by coral pillars, it being just one tiny part of what was, in essence, a never-ending labyrinth of rooms and corridors. The TARDIS was a world inside a box, a magic trick and an illusion, and she loved it.

As she stood there across the threshold and patted her hand against the railings, the atmosphere felt as though it shifted. She smiled - it was the TARDIS, welcoming her back. "I missed you, too," she replied, taking a few steps further into the control room and staring up at the central column as it sat there glowing an eerie green-blue, still and at peace. She liked to think of the glowing column as the heart of the TARDIS, even though she knew far too well where the real heart was concealed, and of the blinding light that was contained therein.

"You've changed."

Hope turned and set her eyes upon the Doctor, the 'impostor'. He smiled back at her, unchanged from their last encounter, as samey as the TARDIS around them.

"You haven't," she retorted.

He laughed a little at that. "No, no… I don't age."

"You just make one big change once in a while, right?"

He cocked his head to one side. "I suppose that's one way of putting it."

"Will I ever change like that?" Hope asked, not really a question she'd been intending to ask. "Change my face and everything? Become someone new?"

He leant against the console, and replied frankly, "I don't know."

She nodded and looked down.

"You do look a lot like your mum," he continued.

She gave him a pleasant smile. "Everyone says that."

The Doctor gazed at her a moment longer before he pushed himself away from the console and paced around her, scrutinising her every feature. "Your hair's darker than Rose's, of course, and the eyes…" He lowered himself to his haunches and looked up into her eyes, making her smile even more. He nodded. "Yes… you have my eyes."

"The eyes you used to have, you mean."

He conceded with a quick nod and returned to his feet, reaching to scratch behind his head. "Well, yeah…"

Hope's eyes took on a sad aura. "Mum missed you, you know."

He nodded slowly. "I know."

"It was really hard for her. It still is. And can you blame her? I mean, you changed so completely… maybe not as much as she once thought, but still, it comes as a shock when someone you love transforms into a new face and almost a new personality." Hope paused, looking down as she felt her own emotions rise. "But then I have to stop and think of how you must feel, too." She stared into his eyes again. "How do you deal with it? The changes?"

He shook his head frankly. "I don't know. I just… get on with it, I suppose."

"And us? How are we meant to deal with it? The people you leave behind? Your family."

He looked down and sighed sorrowfully. "Family? My people are all gone…"

Hope shook her head. "But we're not. I'm not. Aren't we family?"

He turned and looked her up and down again. She had Rose's poise, that determined pout and confident manner, but her spirit… it was as much his as it was Rose's. "You're right," he said, and his aura brightened as he walked right up to her and said, "I have a proposition for you, Hope Tyler."

"Yes, dad?"

The Doctor grinned at this, and gently lay a hand on her shoulder. "Do you wanna come with me?"

**The End**

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**NB:** Thank you to everyone for reading, and many more apologies for taking so long to finish what should have been an easy project. I've enjoyed writing it and I hope you've enjoyed reading it, too. There's no planned sequel since I have no story to continue with in my head, and I don't particularly like writing tenth Doctor stuff, but, as the saying goes, never say never. :) It's been for the fans, for the fun, and especially for Nine. :) Now go and enjoy series 3.


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